Vincent Canby

At its best, Light Sleeper is merely theoretical. Most of the time, though, it is artificial and laughably unbelievable. Even the dark, gritty Manhattan locations don't add authenticity.

Wes Craven's Swamp Thing wants desperately to be funny and, from time to time, it is. However, you might wish it would trust the audience to discover the humor for itself.

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.

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.

Robin and Marian is a hybrid movie, one that seems embarrassed by feelings; yet it works best when it admits those feelings, when it plays them straight.

It contains too many show-down scenes, too much raw material that hasn't been refined, and more brutality than either the movie or the audience can make dramatic sense of. Yet it also contains a magnificent performance by Jessica Lange in the title role. Here is a performance so unfaltering, so tough, so intelligent and so humane that it seems as if Miss Lange is just now, at long last, making her motion picture debut.

It is an intelligent movie, but interesting only in the context of his other works.

Mr. Russell's Tommy virtually explodes with excitement on the screen. A lot of it is not quite the profound social commentary it pretends to be, but that's beside the point of the fun.

Siegel has decorated the movie with a lot of colorful bit characters including a chatty, sex‐obsessed old woman, but the action sequences give the film its content as well as style.

Scarface is the most stylish and provocative - and maybe the most vicious - serious film about the American underworld since Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather."

The film is not only a treasure in itself—witty, sophisticated an often beautifully funny, though it means to be “serious,” as Chaplin says—it's also a rare opportunity to see what Chaplin is like as a filmmaker when he is not contemplating his own image.

VENGEANCE IS MINE, directed by Shohei Imamura, a Japanese director largely unknown in this country, is chilly without being austere, the sort of confounding movie that tells us too much and not enough.

The plot, which more or less prompts the gags without interfering with them, has something to do with a competition between the two police academies to see which one will survive a state-decreed budget cut. It's perfectly serviceable.

It is a film of enormous visceral power with, in the central role, a performance by Tom Cruise that defines everything that is best about the movie.

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.

The real thing. It's a sneakily rude, truly zany farce that treats its lunatic characters with a solemnity that perfectly matches the way in which they see themselves.

The movie proceeds at the pace of a child reluctant to go to bed. It dawdles over irrelevant details and grows sleepier and sleepier until it seems to be snoozing, though still standing up.

One of the most deliriously funny, ingenious and stylish American adventure movies ever made.

An entertaining movie that, like a video game once played, tends to disappear from one's memory bank as soon as it's finished.

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.

This one is a cut-rate Gremlins, about some small, nasty creatures brought forth by a young man dabbling in the occult.

Miss Livingston's interviews reveal a way of living that is both highly structured and self-protective.

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SHERIFF, a Western period farce about a town-taming supersheriff, is something designed for sensibilities shaped by "Petticoat Junction" and "Green Acres."

Howard Franklin's screenplay plays less like a feature film than like the pilot for a failed television series about New York policemen.

Like the novel, the movie means to be trendy but it is out of touch, though not exactly out of date. It has no recognizable center of interest, no anchor for our attention. It's a series of whoopee-cushion gags...More than anything else, The Hotel New Hampshire is exhausting.

Even when the material is feeble, as it is here, Mr. Dangerfield can sometimes be funny, a gravelly-voiced comic confusion of emotional insecurities laced with aggressive tendencies.

Given the premise, which is said to be inspired by the song by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, virtually everything that happens can be predicted from the opening frame.