Vincent Canby

A very engaging, loose-limbed sort of comedy. It's written, directed and acted with amiability, which doesn't disguise the bitterness immediately beneath the surface but, like Eddie himself, absorbs it.

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.

Watching Loaded Weapon 1 is like playing Trivial Pursuit with experts. It's exhausting.

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.

It's also an ensemble piece acted to loopy perfection by a remarkable cast headed by Judy Davis, Sydney Pollack, Mia Farrow, Juliette Lewis, Liam Neeson and Mr. Allen, who's also the writer, director and ringmaster, as well as his own best friend.

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.

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]

It stars Chuck Norris in what his associates describe as ''the first comedy role in his action-packed career.'' How can they tell? Certainly not from the film, which is lightweight without being lighthearted.

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

The movie was directed by Jack Gold from a screenplay by John Briley and it's fuzzy on a number of key issues that possibly could have made it fun, had they been sharper.

The movie itself is anything but anticlimactic. By putting his cameras on the cycles, Brown achieves audience-participation effects with speed that amount to marvelous delirium.

If you think about Jaws for more than 45 seconds you will recognize it as nonsense, but it's the sort of nonsense that can be a good deal of fun, if you like to have the wits scared out of you at irregular intervals.

Under Fire, which was written by Ron Shelton and Clayton Frohman, from a story by Mr. Frohman, means well but it is fatally confused.

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.

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

An enchanted lark about wiseguys and those hustlers who think they are wiseguys, but aren't.

Pat Garrett and Billy the kid suggest either that he (Peckinpah) has begun to take talk about his genius too seriously (it can happen to the best) or that he has fallen in with bad company.

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

The movie is a big, costly, phony exercise in myth‐making, machismo, romance-of-the-open-road nonsense and incredible self‐indulgence.

It's not that Oliver and Company is not up to par. It actively denies its own unique heritage. [18 Nov 1988, p.C8]

James Foley's After Dark, My Sweet is a brisk, entertaining contemporary melodrama about the kind of sleazy characters who populated California crime literature 35 years ago. That's no surprise, since the screenplay, adapted by Robert Redlin and Mr. Foley, is based on Jim Thompson's novel, published in 1955.

Except for Mr. Lloyd, the film is so sweet-natured and bland that it is almost instantly forgettable.

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.

The Object of Beauty might have been practically perfect escapist entertainment if the screenplay had been as smooth as the cast. Mr. Lindsay-Hogg has written some attractive characters and a lot of bright lines, but he needs a script doctor. He has let the plot confuse things.

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.

Huston's affection for life's eccentrics, as well as its rejects and misfits, is Legendary—so much so that it has sometimes seemed as if he had cast his films as if running a mission. In Fat City he has kept himself under control. The result is one of the three or four most beautifully acted films seen so far this year.

Fat Man and Little Boy is so confused, so stunningly ineffective, that General Groves's hawkish statements are more persuasive than the dove-ish apprehensions expressed by the scientists. Even the sight of a scientist dying horribly of radiation poisoning fails to be moving.

A lot of the other period details aren't too firmly anchored in time, but the film is so good-natured, so obviously aware of everything it's up to, even its own picturesque frauds, that I opt to go along with it. One forgives its unrelenting efforts to charm, if only because The Sting itself is a kind of con game, devoid of the poetic aspirations that weighed down "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."