Vincent Canby

Mr. Donner has obvious difficulty coordinating the various elements of the overall vision.

The story it tells is so outsized, bizarre, funny, and eccentric, the movie compels attention. [11 Apr 1980, p.6]

Mr. Polanski and Mr. Towne attempted nothing so witty and entertaining, being content instead to make a competently stylish, more or less thirites-ish movie that continually made me wish I were back seeing "The Maltese Falcon" or "The Big Sleep." Others may not be as finicky. [21 June 1974]

The film tries to cover too much ground, even though Calder Willingham's script eliminates or telescopes events and characters from the Berger novel.

Though the film was photographed on what appear to have been extremely difficult locations in Louisiana and Texas, it never once convinces you that it's anything but pretentious moviemaking.

An elaborately produced, mostly charmless adventure-comedy that intends to make fun of a kind of romantic fiction that's one step removed from what the movie is all about.

The Fortune Cookie is no more sunny--and, if possible, even less romantic--than Kiss Me, Stupid, Mr. Wilder's last film and a comedy of unrelieved vulgarity, but it has style and taste.

The movie is massive, shapeless, often unexpectedly moving, confusing, sad, vivid and very, very long.

Wild Style lacks a lot of the style of the people in it, but it never neutralizes their vitality.

Make no mistake about it: Miss Hemingway, a beauty who looks a lot like Miss Stratten, is not giving an impersonation but a true performance, as fully realized as the somewhat limited circumstances allow. There is an alertness, humor and intelligence to her work that immediately identifies her as one of our best young film actresses, someone who reinvents character in her own image rather than simply miming it.

Bad Influence is full of sharply observed subsidiary characters and details of dress and behavior. Among other things, they help ease one past the plot's point of no return.

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

Honeymoon in Vegas is a virtually nonstop scream of benign delirium, pop entertainment as revivifying as anything you're likely to see this year. It's a romantic farce in which the explosion of the epically earnest and funny central situation creates shock waves that leave no person or thing untouched. Even the film's bit players and extras are funny.

George MacDonald Fraser, Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson are responsible for the story and screenplay, which was directed by John Glen, who does much better than he did with "For Your Eyes Only." However, the material is markedly better, and the budget seems noticeably larger. Peter Lamont's production design is both extravagant and funny.

Single White Female is Mr. Schroeder's bid to compete in the mass market, and there's no reason he shouldn't succeed. The film is smooth, entertaining and believably sophisticated. It has far more sound psychological underpinnings than other movies of its type.

Fast, vivd espionage-betrayal thriller, dandy plot. [24 Sep 1975]

The director, who also wrote the original story and screenplay, hasn't succeeded in making a drama that is really much more aware than the characters themselves. The result is a movie that is as precise—and as small—as a contact print.

An inept science-fiction film from George A. Romero, the Pittsburgh man who established himself as the Grandma Moses of exurban horror films with The Night of the Living Dead.

The movie grows more and more desperate until it seems to go to pieces like poor brilliant Bagley. The final madness has less to do with wit than with a cinematic effect. The film's good humor, however, is consistent.

To appreciate it fully, however, one must have a completely uncritical fondness for Kirk Douglas as he acts his heart out in two roles; for picturesque landscapes; for silly plots, and for dialogue that leans heavily on aphorisms too homespun to be repeated in a big-city newspaper.

The movie has the fuzzy focus of someone who has stared too long at a light bulb. Narrative points aren't made and the wrong points are emphasized. It could also be that too much footage was shot so that, when the time came for editing, a lot of essential material had to be cut out.

Greystoke is one of the most thoroughly enjoyable films of its kind I've ever seen.

This "Prelude to a Kiss" is not only without charm and wit, but it's also clumsily set forth: many people seeing it may wonder what, in heaven's name, is going on.

A fascinating, slightly chilly picture — as well as one of the best Preminger films in years.

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.

The movie seems to have been planned, written, acted, shot and edited by people who were constantly being overruled by other people. It's totally lifeless.

Working Girls, though a work of fiction, sounds as authentic as might a documentary about coal miners. The camera attends to the duties of the ''girls'' without apparent emotional response.

As performers, they both are so aggressive, so creepy and off‐putting, that Harold and Maude are obviously made for each other, a point the movie itself refuses to recognize with a twist ending that betrays, I think, its life‐affirming pre tensions.

A very funny meditation on the old ''what happens when you flush the goldfish down the john?'' nightmare. It is also a formula film that simultaneously demonstrates the specific requirements of the formula while sending them up with good humor.

Almost always entertaining to watch and infuriatingly wrong in several important ways, chief among these being the casting of Miss Adjani as Marya.

Though Last Exit to Brooklyn is bleak, the gloom is never trivial. The effect, instead, is elegiac.

Like the lovely, extravagantly overemphasized nineteen-thirties' costumes and production designed by Tony Walton, Murder on the Orient Express is much less a literal re-creation of a type of thirties movie than an elaborate and witty tribute that never for a moment condescends to the subject.

Mr. Sargent and Mr. Zinneman have amplified the story with solemn care, in good taste (which is not always desirable), and have come forth with a film that is both well-meaning and on the side of the angels but with the exception of a half-dozen scenes, lifeless.

Mr. Aykroyd and Mr. Hanks play well together, but the funniest performance in the film is that of Dabney Coleman, as the smut king (who lisps). Somewhat less diverting are the car chases and the time out necessary to explain the throwaway story.

A big commercial entertainment of unusually satisfying order. [11 Dec 1992]

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

It's a nasty, biased, self-serving movie that also happens to be hilarious most of the time.

By, some peculiar alchemy, The Way We Were turns into the kind of compromised claptrap that Hubbell is supposed to be making within the film and that we're meant to think is a sellout. It is.

Miss Lange is not a bad actress, but her miscasting is fatal to the picture and exemplifies its tiresomely genteel artfulness.

It's another example of the ever-widening gap between the real world and the fantasies of a kind of artistic temperament more concerned with random self expression than with the expression of coherent feelings or ideas about love, alienation, outrage, politics or even of movie-making. It shrivels the imagination instead of enriching it. [7 Oct. 1981]

Its grossness—its bigger-than-life quality — is so much a part of its style (and what West was writing about) that one respects the extravagances, the almost lunatic scale on which Mr. Schlesinger has filmed its key sequences.

Norma Rae is a seriously concerned contemporary drama, illuminated by some very good performances and one, Miss Field's, that is spectacular.

Warlock is unexpectedly entertaining, having been concocted with comic imagination by D. T. Twohy, who wrote the screenplay, and Steve Miner, the director.

La Cage aux Folles is naughty in the way of comedies that pretend to be sophisticated but actually serve to reinforce the most popular conventions and most witless stereotypes.

Mr. Levinson, who both wrote and directed Diner, the small, exquisitely realized comedy about growing up aimless in Baltimore, here seems to be at the service of other people's decisions. Though entertaining in short stretches, The Natural has no recognizable character of its own.

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.

Mr. Brickman, who directed the film and wrote the screenplay (with Thomas Baum), has a real gift for eccentric comedy and characters. The Manhattan Project, with its vaguely populist leanings, isn't crazy enough. Mr. Brickman fails to make big issues comprehensible. He just makes them small.

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.

The performances—which have a lot to do with the right casting, particularly in the smaller roles—are impeccable. Paul Newman maintains an easy balance between star and character-actor. The leading-man authority is there, but it's given comic perspective by the intensity of the character and by its tackiness, evident even in the clothes he wears.

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.

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.

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.

In place of narrative drive it relies, on the momentum created by ‐ its visual spectacle, its prodigal way with ideas, its wit and its enthusiasm for the lunatic business of making movies.

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.

The Big Chill represents the best of mainstream American film making. It's a reminder that the same people who turn out our megabuck fantasies are often capable of working even more effectively on the small, intimate scale of The Big Chill.

Strong, stinging triangle of two Vietnam vets and one wife.

Urban Cowboy is the most entertaining, most perceptive commercial American movie of the year to date. Here is a tough-talking, softhearted romantic melodrama that sees a world that is far more bleak than the movie, or the characters in it, ever have time to acknowledge.

Raggedy Man is something like a country-and-western ballad that relates a supposedly sad, melodramatic story but whose simple, repetitive, upbeat rhythms effectively deny the awfulness of the events being sung about.

A good old-fashioned adventure movie that is so stuffed with robust incidents and characters that you can relax and enjoy it without worrying whether it actually happened or even whether it's plausible.

Mr. Parker is an eclectic film maker. He seems to have no readily identifiable obsessions that define supposedly more serious directors. He's a very able technician who needs a good screenplay, which is what's missing here.

Topaz is not only most entertaining. It is, like so many Hitchcock films, a cautionary fable by one of the most moral cynics of our time.

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.

This veteran movie icon handles both jobs with such intelligence and facility I'm just now beginning to realize that, though Mr. Eastwood may have been improving over the years, it's also taken all these years for most of us to recognize his very consistent grace and wit as a film maker.

Should it survive—and I suspect it will — it will be largely because of the restrained, affectingly comic performance of Peter O'Toole in the title role. Everything else in this British public-school romance is either out of symmetry or out of date.

It's a series of big, foolish but entertaining spectacle scenes.

Mr. Schrader is a director of great rigor and discipline. The movie is fascinated by the baroque behavior it observes, but without imitating it.

Biloxi Blues, carefully adapted and reshaped by Mr. Simon, is a very classy movie, directed and toned up by Mike Nichols so there's not an ounce of fat in it.

A silly attempt to crossbreed an Our Gang comedy with a classic horror film, which usually means that both genres have reached the end of the line.

Cahill, United States Marshal was directed by Andrew V. McLaglen and written by Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink. Perhaps recognizing the new limitations of their star, they spend a good deal of time trying to turn a conventional Western into a children-in-peril movie.

Mr Demme has a special talent for locating the humor and pathos within the commonplace experiences of American life.

The film recreates Toby and Caroline's aimlessness, but without appearing to understand it enough to make it as moving and important as it ought to be.

Any movie that Jacqueline Susann thinks would damage her reputation as a writer cannot be all bad. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls isn't—which is not to say it is any good.

Valiant Southern sheriff. Effective, unsurprising.

Stay Hungry, the new film directed by Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens), isn't all bad. It just seems that way when it pretends to be more eccentric than it is and to have more on its mind than it actually does.

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

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.

The symbolism here is dream-book basic.

Its moods don't quite mesh and its aerial sequences are so vivid—sometimes literally breathtaking—that they upstage the human drama, but the total effect is healthily romantic. It's the kind of movie that enriches dreams even though its story seems sort of strung-out, like a first draft, and includes moments that slip into bathos.

As in his last film, "Sorcerer," Mr. Friedkin seems bent on supplying us with more sociological information than is entirely necessary, whereas more information about the heist itself would have been welcome.

Unfortunately the plot thickens so rapidly and so lumpily that one very soon loses interest in spite of the quite stunning and gory special effects.

With far fewer high spirits than “Animal House,” and only two characters of any interest, Meatballs reveals itself to be a loud, offkey cry for conformism of a most disappointing sort. It's a sheep in wolf's clothing.

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.

Escape to Witch Mountain is a Walt Disney production for children who will watch absolutely anything that moves...It's not very scary, but neither is it very exciting.

Plausibility is not always important, but in a film as bereft of distinctive style and wit as Coma, it helps to believe in something. It can even help if one is offended. The aftereffect of Coma is a catlike yawn, benign and bored.

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.

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]