Vincent Canby

A horror film that is less mindless than most in that it is both funny and gross.

A film that satisfies not because it sweeps us off our feet, knocks us into the aisles, provides us with visions of infinity or definitions of God, but because it is precise, intelligent, civilized, and because it never for a moment mistakes its narrative purpose.

Breathless has a lot of mindless drive, but it's also funny. It's full of knowing quotes from other movies and from literature - William Faulkner in addition to Marvel Comics. It's less a film maker's journey of discovery than the film maker's testimony to his awareness of ''cinema,'' and sometimes it's just too much.

The screenplay is funny but even better are the sight gags that are a kind of inventory of everything Clouseau has been unable to master in his long, irrelevant career.

It's the achievement of Mr. Malle, the director of Atlantic City, Pretty Baby and a lot of other very fine, conventional movies, that he has successfully turned his two real-life personalities into actors capable of representing themselves.

Manufactured comedy of a slick order, depending aImost entirely for its effects on the sight and sound of a bunch of kids behaving as if they were small adults. It's a formula that worked for Our Gang Comedy for many years, and works again here with a bright screenplay by Paul Brickman, based on Bill Lancaster's original characters, and direction of intelligent lightness by Michael Presman.

Even though the mechanics and demands of movie-making slow what should be the furious tempo, this Front Page displays a giddy bitterness that is rare in any films except those of Mr. Wilder. It is also, much of the time, extremely funny

Mr. Itami often strains after comic effects that remain elusive. The most appealing thing about Tampopo is that he never stops trying. A funny sensibility is at work here.

Wolfen is so good-looking that one tends to ignore a certain but very real inner vacuity.

Both Mr. Sellers and Mr. Edwards delight in old gags, and part of the joy of The Pink Panther Strikes Again is watching the way they spin out what is essentially a single routine, such as one fellow's trying, unsuccessfully, to help another fellow out of a lake.

Evil Under the Sun, the latest Agatha Christie whodunit to be given the all-star screen treatment, has nothing but style, but its style goes a long way.

The screenplay, by Jerry Belson and Brock Yates, is not so surreally funny as the one for the first film, but funny lines are not what the picture is about. Smokey and the Bandit II is about movement, action, frustration and destruction, and Mr. Needham, one of Hollywood's most successful stunt artists before he became a director, is very good at this sort of thing. Smokey and the Bandit is entertaining in a brainless way.

If you have the Clouzot habit, as I have, there's very little that Mr. Edwards and Mr. Sellers could do that would make you find the movie disappointing.

Though there is a near vaccuum at the center of the film, "Sommersby" is never boring, largely because of Ms. Foster's beautifully self-possessed presence.

It's the none too promising assumption of See No Evil, Hear No Evil that one physical disability complements another, and that Wally and Dave are made for each other. Yet, against all odds, the movie goes on to prove it with a lot of good, unlikely humor that is often not in the best of taste.Mr. Pryor and Mr. Wilder have never worked better together, possibly because they are playing characters who, being blind and deaf, are not especially funny to begin with, but who also have a certain amount of intelligence.

Has the manners and the gadgetry of a sci-fi adventure film but is, at heart, an engagingly mean, cruel, nasty, funny send-up of television. It's not quite Network, but then it also doesn't take itself too seriously.

It seems to want to be a Hitchcockian kind of cat-and-mouse suspense melodrama, which demands a lot more ingenuity than Mr. Reiner or Mr. Goldman ever muster. Misery is just good enough that one wishes it were far better. The ideas are there, but they become lost in the heavy-handed treatment.

An enjoyably hokey, big-budget theatrical film with a lot of kicks and the soul of a television movie. It's exactly what it announces itself to be and won't offend (or surprise) anyone...Although "Dragon" has few surprises, it is an entertainingly predictable enterprise.

Yet for all its evident talent, Of Mice and Men is not very exciting. It could be that looking back at Lennie and George with the perspective of time robs them of their urgency. There's no surprise left.

Patty Hearst is a model of swift, spare, unsentimental film making about a character who can never be known, as most fictional characters are, and about a specific time and circumstances that, with hindsight, seem incredible.

Mr. Zieff demonstrates great skill in keeping the gags aloft and in finding new ways by which to free the laughs trapped inside old routines about latrine duty, war games, forced marches and calisthenics. [10 Oct 1980, p.C6]

Part 2 has been compiled with the kind of intelligence and affection that allow us to get some purchase on the Hollywood history made by M-G-M without spending our whole lives at the job.

An enjoyable paperback of a film, a lightweight, breezy experience that, by never pretending to be anything more than what it is, disarms criticism.

Bopha! is so firmly grounded in physical reality (it was shot in Zimbabwe), in the looks and passions of its characters, even in its music, that its deliberate progress from one obligatory scene to the next still carries surprising emotional weight.

When the film's focus is on labor history, remembered or recreated, it is extremely moving. Fortunately this is most of the time.

The over-all production is very handsome, and the performances fine, especially Newman, Redford, and Miss Ross, who must be broadly funny and straight, almost simultaneously.

I must say that I found it interesting (even when it approached the ludicrous) because of its place in relation to other Siegel films and because I have nothing but appreciation for the performers.

The screenplay for A Cry in the Dark, adapted by Robert Caswell and Mr. Schepisi from a book by John Bryson, isn't perfect, but it provides Miss Streep with the kind of raw material that allows her to create a character who, while being perfectly ordinary, is always unexpectedly special.

The Big Picture, the first theatrical film to be directed by the talented Christopher Guest (a co-writer and a star of ''This Is Spinal Tap), is a consistently genial, intermittently funny send-up of the current Hollywood scene as demonstrated by the rise and fall of an award-winning film student.

Here is a thoroughly genial movie, a combination of A.A. Milne, Busby Berkeley and a small bit of Blake Edwards.

With the exception of Nicholson, its good things are familiar things - the rock score, the lovely, sometimes impressionistic photography by Laszlo Kovacs, the faces of small-town America.

Herzog's film seems well worth the effort to me. It's funny without being silly, eerie without being foolish and uncommonly beautiful in a way that has nothing to do with mere prettiness.

It's Gary Busey's galvanizing solo performance that gives meaning to an otherwise shapeless and bland feature-length film about the American rock-and-roll star who was killed in a plane crash in 1959.

Ceddo is a folk tale presented as the kind of pageant you might see enacted at some geographic location made famous by history and now surrounded by souvenir stands. It's not cheap or gaudy, but it's an intensely solemn, slightly awkward procession of handsomely costumed scenes designed to pass on a lot of information as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Watching Children of a Lesser God, the screen adaptation of Mark Medoff's 1980 Broadway play, is like being on a cruise to nowhere aboard a ship with decent service and above-par fast-food. Everything has been carefully programmed so that there are no surprises, no discoveries, nothing to do except to sit -with eyes propped open - and applaud the crew's efficiency.

Stuffed with plummy English accents and the most inauthentic classroom scenes since those of "Billy Madison," Life, Translated has a childlike innocence that seems targeted toward a preteenage audience.

The movie seems to want to be a James Bond sort of adventure in black drag, but it's more reminiscent of Batman.

At Close Range is never boring. There's something bold about the film's wealth of imagery, but it also so overstates the material of the screenplay that it eventually annihilates both it and the story, which might possibly have been moving and terrifying. This just looks like fancy movie making.

Miss Kinski is a major problem. She's a beauty, all right, but she appears to have no flair whatever for comedy of this sort, or maybe of any sort.

Robert Mulligan's Summer of '42 is a memory movie, written, directed and acted with such uncommon good humor that I don't think you'll be put off by its sweet soft-focus, at least until you start analyzing it afterwards.

Hammett, the first major American movie by Wim Wenders, isn't quite the mess one might expect, considering the length of time it's been in production and the number of people who seem to have contributed to it. It's not ever boring, but heaven only knows what it's supposed to be about or why it was made. One answer would serve both questions.

Red Heat is a topically entertaining variation on the sort of action-adventure nonsense that plays best on television. Mr. Hill's touch is heavy when he takes himself seriously. However, he has a real gift for instantly disposable fantasy.

Less a movie than an extended sketch, and it's to the credit of Mr. Ritt, his stars and Gary Devore, the screenwriter, that the movie is so much fun, even given its occasional soggy patches.

An action melodrama that doesn't trust its action to speak louder than words.

A Walt Disney comedy based on the old magic-formula story that's served the company well through thick (The Absent-Minded Professor) and thin (The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes). The new film, which opened at theaters throughout the city yesterday, is nowhere near as funny as the first but a lot better than the second.

Clash of the Titans is profligate in its use of talented people who are not particularly at home in this sort of film, though they all pay serious attention to their work.

Buck and the Preacher, Sidney Poitier's first film as director as well as star, is a loose, amiable, post-Civil War Western with a firm though not especially severe Black Conscience.

The characters don't motivate the drama in any real way. They are cut and shaped to fit it, and if the cast of Black Sunday were not so good, and if Mr. Frankenheimer were a less able director, the movie would be unendurably boring.

Where Eagles Dare is the ultimate metaphor. It encapsulates human experience into an ordered, comprehensible melodrama that is both absurd and entertaining.

Miss Duvall is superb - genteely ladylike one minute, a woman of volcanic passions the next.

One of the nicer things that can be said about The Fox and the Hound is that it breaks no new ground whatsoever. This is a pretty, relentlessly cheery, old-fashioned sort of Disney cartoon feature, chock-full of bouncy songs of an upbeatness that is stickier than Krazy-Glue and played by animals more anthropomorphic than the humans that occasionally appear.

It is absurd, sentimental, pretty, never quite as funny as it intends to be, but quite acceptable, if only as a seasonal ritual.

Though Psycho II is essentially camp entertainment, Mr. Perkins plays Norman as legitimately as possible, and sometimes to real comic effect. His new Norman doesn't seem as much rehabilitated as reconstituted, but as what? That's the point of the film.

A perfectly adequate though not really comparable - sequel to Stanley Kubrick's witty, mind- bending science-fiction classic, ''2001: A Space Odyssey.'

Lethal Weapon 3 isn't that much worse than the two earlier films.

Desert Hearts has no voice or style of its own. It's as flat as a recorded message from the telephone company.

The biggest, longest, most expensive Leone Western to date, and, in many ways, the most absurd... Granting the fact that it is quite bad, Once Upon the Time in the West is almost always interesting, wobbling, as it does, between being an epic lampoon and a serious hommage to the men who created the dreams of Leone's childhood. (Review of Original Release)

Though publicized as a breakthrough into adult comedy for Mr. Reitman (''National Lampoon's Animal House,'' ''Meatballs,'' ''Ghostbusters''), this new film is less a true adult comedy than a teen-age comedy populated by adults who are functioning in an adult world.

Entertainingly slapdash.

Though the movie looks beautiful, the elegant style occasionally works against it, showing it up. This happens in a striking close-up of Miss Keaton, sitting alone on a photogenically windswept ocean beach as she is supposed to be thinking sensitive poet-type thoughts. Yet the image is empty. It's not the actress. It's not the director, whose close-ups of Miss Keaton in Annie Hall burst with love, pride and affection.The movie that contains the image fails to invest it with any associations whatsoever.

From the opening frames of John Frankenheimer's film version of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, you get the feeling that you're being taken on a guided tour of one of the greatest American plays ever written, instead of seeing a screen adaptation with a life of its own.

Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously is a good, romantic melodrama that suffers more than most good, romantic melodramas in not being much better than it is.

Though the language is vulgar, the macho posturing absurd and some of the plotting inscrutable, Raw Deal has a kind of seemliness to it. It delivers every punch it promises.

Miss Kinski and Mr. McDowell are most effective - eerie and damned -and Mr. Heard is stalwart and self-effacing as the mere human who stumbles onto the truth and forever guards the secret.

Poison, which won the grand prize as the best fiction work at this year's Sundance Film Festival, is an imaginative film that, like the infectious Tom Graves, is eventually overwhelmed by its ambitions. The movie needs to evoke more than the ghost of Genet to give it resonance.

If you can imagine a remake of Steven Spielberg's Poltergeist in which the spirits of the dead have been shoved aside by equally loud, unruly plumbers and carpenters, you'll have some idea of The Money Pit.

The highway is alive with the sound of a loud musical score, spectacular car crashes, pursuits, sudden breakdowns and jokes, practical and impractical. Some of it is ingenious, and all of it is breathless...The Cannonball Run is inoffensive and sometimes funny. Because there are only a limited number of variations that can be worked out on this same old highway race, don't bother to see it unless you're already hooked on the genre.

Within the limits and cliches of utterly predictable material, Mr. Coppola is still finally able to make this one from the heart.

Last Action Hero is something of a mess, but a frequently enjoyable one. It tries to be too many things to too many different kinds of audiences, the result being that it will probably confuse, and perhaps even alienate, the hard-core action fans.

Like an old electric automobile, the movie rolls forward, without surprises, steadily and almost soundlessly, except for the bomb explosion on the soundtrack. It's never as funny as it looks, but it's a pleasant enough ride if you like your companions.

Though the new movie has its share of blood and gore, it is mostly creepy and, considering the bizarre circumstances, surprisingly funny.

Although its aspirations are high, the film works only fitfully when Mr. Singleton exercises his gift for vernacular speech, for finding the comic undertow in otherwise tragic situations, and even for parody.

Mr. Almodovar's comic invention runs out too soon, leaving the audience to giggle weakly in anticipation of the big laughs and disorienting shocks that never arrive.

An elaborate, expensive‐looking, ludicrously jingoistic historical‐adventure that comes out so firmly in favor of Teddy Roosevelt's “Big Stick” policy, 70 years later, that it could also be a put‐on.

If Striking Distance were a book, it could be called a good read. Instead, it's a painless watch.

All of the performances are limited by the material and, in the case of Mr. Stoltz, by Michael Westmore's quite spectacular makeup. The exception - and the film's best sequence - occurs when Rusty's very middle-class, well-meaning parents, played by Estelle Getty and Richard Dysart, come to visit. In these few, brief minutes, Mask becomes specific and interesting. Otherwise it's the kind of story that would work better as a television feature.

One-fourth of the film is so brilliant—and so brilliantly acted by Dustin Hoffman—that it helps cool one's impatience with the rest of the film, which is much more fancily edited and photographed but no more profound than those old movie biographies Jack L. Warner used to grind out about people like George Gershwin, Mark Twain and Dr. Ehrlich.

More problematical is the tone of the film, which attempts to be both compassionate and goofy, though the events are funny only if they are seen as farcical.

A cheerful, inoffensive fantasy in which such attractive live actors as Steve Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy play second fiddle to machinery that, in this case, means No. 5, designed by Syd Mead and engineered and realized by Eric Allard.

The Europeans isn't simply pretty, it's so relentlessly pretty it becomes almost boring to watch.

A good-natured lowbrow farce about two southern California garbage men who dream of opening their own surf shop.

Mr. Scott directs the film as if he were trying to win a prize for demolishing a building in record time. The opening is good: stylish video images of a night football game played in a torrential rain, climaxed by the only scene in the film that has legitimate shock. After that, the brutality and the pace don't slacken, but interest does.

Crowley has a good, minor talent for comedy-of-insult, and for creating enough interest, by way of small character revelations, to maintain minimum suspense.

In much the way that Raymond stays detached, the performance seems to exist outside the film but, instead of illuminating Rain Man, it upstages the work of everyone else involved. [16 Dec 1988, p.C12]

It's a frenetic farce that takes the form of a folksy study of Smalltown, U.S.A., where there is no problem that can't eventually be solved on top of a bed, in a bath.

What's missing from the film is any urgent interior meaning, and this it may be because of the distractions of the exterior details. It may also be because the conflicts that rage within Lancelot — between duty and desire, courtly love and physical love — simply aren't complex enough to bring out the best in Mr. Bresson.

The Escape Artist represents a lot more talent than is ever demonstrated on the screen.

A tricky, cheerful, aggressively friendly Walt Disney fantasy for children who still find enchantment in pop-up books, plush animals by Steiff and dreams of independent flight.

Resourceful and valiant though unsuccessful attempt to revive the kind of animated feature identified with the Golden Age of Walt Disney. If The Secret of N.I.M.H. had had a screenplay to equal its great visual qualities, it might have become a classic in its own right.

Even though most of the gags are too familiar or too dumb to be hilarious, Airplane II is too good-natured to be a serious irritant.

The best thing about the movie, flimed mostly in Kenya, is its performances, funny and hip and self-assured in the manner of television personalities working in front of loving audiences. Mr. Caine and Mr. Poitier are never unaware that their material may not be the greatest, but that doesn't spoil their good spirits, and when a good line comes along they get maximum results without stomping on it or us.

Bound by Honor looks and sounds authentic but, like many community wall paintings, it has the manner less of one artist's vision than of a community endeavor. This may explain its singular shortcomings and its redeeming sincerity.

There are times when Texasville, like the Larry McMurtry novel on which it is based, seems top heavy with eccentrics. Everybody is tirelessly and (worse) lovably oddball. The snappy dialogue occasionally exhausts. Yet also like the book, the movie becomes seriously involving, a cockeyed acknowledgment of an especially American kind of inarticulate despair.

Monty Python's the Meaning of Life is funny but, being unreasonable, I wish it were funny from start to finish.

A thoroughly delightful but far from plausible mystery melodrama that operates exclusively on high spirits and a no-nonsense intelligence that is never sidetracked by coherence.

Even as sequels go in this era of movie mega-series, The Karate Kid Part II peters out faster than most.

Watching it is like spending a day at an amusement park, which is probably what Mr. Spielberg and his associates intended. It moves tirelessly from one ride or attraction to the next, only occasionally taking a minute out for a hot dog, and then going right on to the next unspeakable experience.

A film noir that's murky without being terribly mysterious.