Vincent Canby

A rollicking musical memoir, as much a recollection of the show as of the period, a film that has the charm of a fable and the slickness of Broadway show biz at its breathless best.

My Cousin Vinny is easily the most inventive and enjoyable American film farce in a long time, even during those extended patches when it seems to be marking time or when it continues with a running gag that can't stay the distance. The film has a secure and sophisticated sense of what makes farce so delicious.

A funny film that is as much satire as parody, as much about our time as it is about some of our more bizarre culture heroes.

Bergman creates a stunning picture not only of personal anxiety but also of the fury that may exist just below the surface of any perfect state.

The Turning Point is entertaining, not for discovering new material, but for treating old material with style and romantic feeling that, in this day and age, seem remarkably unafraid.

With this, his fourth commercially released feature, Mr. Jarmusch again demonstrates his mastery of comedy of the oblique. He seems to see his characters through a telescope, while attending to their talk with some kind of long-range listening device. Everything that is seen and heard is vivid and particular, but decidedly foreign. Meanings are elusive. Themes can be supplied by others. He's also becoming an increasingly fine director of actors.

The concerns of French Connection II are not much different from those of old Saturday-afternoon movie serials that used to place their supermen in jeopardy and then figure ways of getting them out. The difference is in the quality of the supermen and in their predicaments.

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.

Top Secret! comes nowhere near ''Airplane!'' but in its own cheerful, low-pressure way, it's about as amiable an entertainment as you will find this summer.

Dick Tracy has just about everything required of an extravaganza: a smashing cast, some great Stephen Sondheim songs, all of the technical wizardry that money can buy (plus the knowledge of how and when to use it), and a screenplay (credited to Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr.) that observes the fine line separating true comedy from lesser camp.

Designed for everybody who still hasn't had his or her fill of break dancing, or who doesn't yet understand that break dancing, rap singing and graffiti are legitimate expressions of the urban artistic impulse.

A very curious though effective entertainment, a scathing social satire in the form of an outrageously clumsy spy story told with a completely straight face.

Even if The Flamingo Kid comes out of sit-com country, the character and the performance effortlessly rise above their origins.

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.

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.

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.

Phantom of the Paradise is an elaborate disaster, full of the kind of facetious humor you might find on bumper stickers and cocktail coasters.

A lot of Over the Edge is awkwardly acted and motivated, but it is staged with such vivid efficiency and concern that, as you watch it, you are frequently caught halfway between a giggle and a gasp.

Any movie that attempts to mix together love, Cuban revolution, the C.I.A., Jewish mothers, J. Edgar Hoover and a few other odds and ends (including a sequence in which someone orders 1,000 grilled cheese sandwiches) is bound to be a little weird—and most welcome.

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.

A genial, gently mocking, brilliantly executed spoof that may offend the purists but which should delight the buffs.

Allen has made a movie that is, in effect, a feature-length, two-reel comedy—something very special and eccentric and funny.

Mr. Frears and Mr. Kureishi have composed Sammy and Rosie as if they were building a giant bonfire in a mock celebration of the achievements of contemporary British society and, by extension, of the civilized world. They throw everything on -love, death, sex, politics, violence. A lot of stuff doesn't easily burn, but there's also plenty that does.

Mr. Sole, whose first feature this is, knows how to direct actors, how to manipulate suspense and when to shift gears: the identity of the killer is revealed at just that point when the audience is about to make the identification, after which the film becomes less of a horror film than an exercise in suspense.

Silent Running is no jerry-built science fiction film, but it's a little too simple-minded to be consistently entertaining.

Good Morning, Vietnam, directed by Barry Levinson (Diner, Tin Men) succeeds in doing something that's very rare in movies, being about a character who really is as funny as he's supposed to be to most of the people sharing the fiction with him. It's also a breakthrough for Mr. Williams, who, for the first time in movies, gets a chance to exercise his restless, full-frontal comic intelligence.

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.

Mr. Cassavetes's use of exaggerated slapstick gestures to underscore the loneliness and fears of his characters is more interesting in theory than funny or moving in actual fact.