Vincent Canby

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is so beautifully acted and so well set (in and around Boston's pool halls, parking lots, side-streets, house trailers and barrooms) that it reminds me a good deal of John Huston's Fat City. It also has that film's ear for the way people talk—for sentences that begin one way and end another, or are stuffed with excess pronouns.

With their remarkable contributions, ''Baron Munchausen'' is full of moments that dazzle, just for the fun of seeing the impossible come to life on the screen. What the Folies-Bergere once was for the foot-weary tourist, ''Baron Munchausen'' is for the television-exhausted child. Nothing much happens, but you can't easily tear your eyes away from it.

It's also absolutely jam- packed with the kind of symbols that delight Freudian analysts of culture, particularly of folk tales.

Movies like The Towering Inferno appear to have been less directed than physically constructed. This one is overwrought and silly in its personal drama, but the visual spectacle is first rate. You may not come out of the theater with any important ideas about American architecture or enterprise, but you will have had a vivid, completely safe nightmare.

The Rookie is an astonishingly empty movie to come from Mr. Eastwood.

Arthur is a terrifically engaging, high-spirited screwball comedy about Arthur's more or less accidental salvation, largely through the love of a good, very poor but equally daffy young woman named Linda Marolla (Liza Minnelli).

Like "Blood Simple," it's full of technical expertise but has no life of its own... The direction is without decisive style. [11 Mar 1987, p.C24]

The members of Mr. Linklater's cast, most of whom are non-professionals, are so amazingly effective that it's hard to believe they didn't make up their own lunacies.

The movie is mostly a series of automobile chases through Los Angeles, but there is also some humor.

Though Knightriders is absurd when you get right down to it, its absurdities are often fun and far less offensive than the solemnities that Mr. Boorman has dished up at far greater expense.

Taking Mr. Bright's excellent screenplay, Ms. Davis, whose background is in music videos, has made a remarkably rich melodrama with a strong narrative line and vivid characters. There's no waste space in this movie. Every second of its 97 minutes counts.

It's a must-see for anyone who shares the belief that Mr. Jarmusch is the most arresting and original American film maker to come out of the 1980's.

Though big of budget, A League of Their Own is one of the year's most cheerful, most relaxed, most easily enjoyable comedies. It's a serious film that's lighter than air, a very funny movie that manages to score a few points for feminism in passing.

Swept Away is less a film about ideas than about previous commitments, for which neither character can be held completely accountable. The enormous appeal of the comedy has to do with the way, briefly, each character, is able to overcome those commitments.

It has its charms but not for a minute is it believeable, and it's certainly never embarrassingly moving in the schmaltzy way of such slick Hollywood kidflicks as Paper Moon and even The Champ. [01 Oct 1980, p.19]

At its best, Shoot the Moon is as spare and as sharp in its detail as fine prose and as continuously surprising.

Line by line, the dialogue isn't all that quotable, but there is consistently funny life on the screen. The film's comic timing is nearly flawless.

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.

A foul-mouthed, bumpercrunching farce that is often funnier in theory than in fact but, even so, is a movie that has more laughs in it than any film of the summer except "Airplane!" It wipes out "The Blues Brothers," "Caddyshack," "Up the Academy," "Where the Buffalo Roam" and just about every other recent comedy aimed, I assume, at an otherwise television-hooked public.

Falling Down is the most interesting, all-out commercial American film of the year to date, and one that will function much like a Rorschach test to expose the secrets of those who watch it.

My Name Is Nobody is terribly knowing. It has the manner of a buff who knows absolutely everything about a subject most other people haven't time for, but it's also very entertaining.

Mr. Crichton's previous films as a director — "Westworld" and "Coma" — are skillful and, each in its own way, entertaining, but they give no hint of the amplitude he displays in this visually dazzling period piece. With Sean Connery as the gang's elegant leader, the sort of mastermind who denies his body nothing, Lesley-Anne Down as his magnificent moll, and Donald Sutherland as his locksmith —"the best screwsman in England" — The Great Train Robbery is classy entertainment of the sort I associate exclusively with movies.

Blake Edwards's frequently hilarious new film, “10,” is the story of George's desperate efforts to come to terms with life in Southern California even though he knows he's inadequate.

A couple of sequences in the middle of the movie just mark time, but usually everything works, to make Nashville the most original, provocative high‐spirited film Mr. Altman has yet given.

Quite clearly, Pookie Adams is a marvelous role, full of tough-sweet humor, and Liza Minnelli, the daughter of Vincente Minnelli and the late Judy Garland, turns it into one of the most appealing performances of the season, a triumph limited only by the squashy movie that encases it.

Mr. Hopkins's screenplay is funny without being condescending, more aware of history, perhaps, than Conan Doyle's mysteries ever were, but always appreciative of the strengths of the original characters and of the etiquette observed in the course of every hunt.

It's also one of those movies that is itself so lethargic that one welcomes its so-called shock moments not because they are scary but because they indicate that not everyone behind the camera has been napping. You don't dread the possibility of something jumping out from behind the door. You long for it.

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