Vincent Canby

It seems unfinished, not yet thought through. Even the title doesn't quite fit, since the New York City that Vladimir discovers is far more densely populated by Southern blacks, Latin Americans, Western Europeans, Orientals and Indians from India than by Russians. It sounds as if it were one of those titles around which a screenplay was eventually composed.

Desert Hearts has no voice or style of its own. It's as flat as a recorded message from the telephone company.

Unlike most sequels, which seem to get bigger, fancier and emptier the further removed they are from their source material, Psycho III has a lean, serviceable, stripped-down quality to it.

As directed by Fred Schepisi and written by Tom Stoppard, The Russia House is confused and dim, far less complex, and even far less fun, than almost any le Carre work yet brought to the screen, excluding The Little Drummer Girl.

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.

Woody Allen's marvelous new comedy, Alice, confirms Mr. Allen's safe arrival on a whole new plateau of film-making.

A very well made, disorienting movie about inarticulated despair and utter hopelessness. It reminds me a lot of ''Over the Edge,'' Jonathan Kaplan's bleak, bitter picture of teen-age life in an architecturally perfect, California housing development. Unlike ''Over the Edge,'' however, The Boys Next Door is less interested in causes than in effects, which Penelope Spheeris, the director, turns into the photographic record of a grim, vivid, joyless ride to hell.

One of the few good, truly funny American political comedies ever made.

Racing With the Moon demonstrates such intelligence and wit that the result is an unexpected pleasure.

Weightless. It is also, unfortunately, without much point at all... A movie of random effects and little accumulative impact.

A wild, noisy, sometimes very funny film that eventually becomes as unstuck in its own exuberance as its hero, Billy Pilgrim, the Illium, N. Y., optometrist, is unstuck in time.

A film noir that's murky without being terribly mysterious.

A big, convoluted, entertainingly dizzy romantic mystery melodrama.

Basically decent, intelligent and sweet. It's a fanciful romantic comedy whose wildest and craziest notion is that Los Angeles, for all of its eccentricities, is a great place to live.

Moonraker begins with one of the funniest and most dangerous (as well as most beautifully photographed and edited) sequences Bond has ever faced.

The action sequences are what the film is all about, and these are remarkably well done, including a climactic, largely bloodless shootout among helicopters and jet fighters over Los Angeles.

The dialogue is often brutally comic, and individual scenes cut deep. Yet the narrative finally becomes almost impenetrable. The focus that the director would have demanded of another writer is lacking here.

Shaft is not a great film, but it's very entertaining.

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.

The lines, like the movie itself, don't scan perfectly, but they are funny in the knowing, cheerfully bigoted way of Cheech and Chong's brand of comedy...Cheech and Chong's Next Movie is casual, slapdash and rude, and it's frequently hilarious in the way of some intense but harmless confrontation between eccentrics on a street corner.

The movie has some good things, but in the way it has been directed by John Flynn it moves so easily and sort of foolishly toward its violent climax that all the tension within Charlie has long since escaped the film.

The Dark Crystal aims, I think, to be a sort of Muppet Paradise Lost but winds up as watered down J.R.R. Tolkien.

A mess of a movie that comes complete with a conventional beginning, middle and end, and long, spongy flashbacks...a nearly perfect example of how not to make a movie of a play.

Although it has been made with intelligence, is well directed and acted and is in touch with the ways of lower-middle-class American life, it has the sort of predictable outrage and shape of a made-for-television movie. It has suspense but little excitement.

The over-all production is very handsome, and the performances fine, especially Newman, Redford, and Miss Ross, who must be broadly funny and straight, almost simultaneously.

I must say that I found it interesting (even when it approached the ludicrous) because of its place in relation to other Siegel films and because I have nothing but appreciation for the performers.

Like Faces, which was rambling and funny and accurate, and which I admired, the new film demonstrates a concern for panicky, inarticulate squares that is so unpatronizing that it comes close to being reverential in a solemnly religious sense. Husbands, however, also puts one's tolerance of simulated cinéma vérité to the test. It is almost unbearably long.

Though there is a near vaccuum at the center of the film, "Sommersby" is never boring, largely because of Ms. Foster's beautifully self-possessed presence.