Vincent Canby

Exhuasting without being much fun.

Miss Keaton, who continues to grow as an actress and film presence, is worth paying attention to in bits and pieces of the movie. She's too good to waste on the sort of material the movie provides, which is artificial without in anyway qualifying as a miracle fabric.

It's not that the movie runs out of steam long before it has gone on for two hours and 33 minutes, but that we have figured it out and become increasingly dumbfounded.

Sweet Charity, the film adaptation of the Broadway musical, has been so enlarged and so inflated that it has become another maximal movie: a long, noisy and, finally, dim imitation of its source material.

The film's beauty is dazzling. It stands with—or perhaps a little ahead of—Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and Roman Polanski's Tess, but it also must be conceded, quickly and without too stern a reproach, that there is less to The French Lieutenant's Woman than meets the dazzled eye.

Straight Time is not a movie to raise the spirits. It is so cool it would leave a chill were it not done with such precision and control that we remain fascinated by a rat, in spite of ourselves.

The Europeans isn't simply pretty, it's so relentlessly pretty it becomes almost boring to watch.

Wolfen is so good-looking that one tends to ignore a certain but very real inner vacuity.

The Fury was directed by Brian De Palma in what appears to have been an all-out effort to transform the small-scale, Grand Guignol comedy of his Carrie into an international horror/spy/occult mind-blower of a movie. He didn't concentrate hard enough, though.

Invigorating.

Fool for Love has several exceptional things going for it, namely the performances by Mr. Shepard as Eddie, Kim Basinger as May and Harry Dean Stanton as the Old Man.

The director, the star and the writer make a fine team in this often riotous tale.

Cross of Iron is Mr. Peckinpah's least interesting, least personal film in years, a hysterically elaborate, made-in-Yugoslavia war spectacle, the work of international financiers and a multinational cast, most of whom are supposed to be Germans although they sound like delegates to an international PEN convention.

Miss Duvall is superb - genteely ladylike one minute, a woman of volcanic passions the next.

Two actors who do have good material, and make the most of it, are Courtney Vance, as the platoon's snappish, highly articulate medic, and Dylan McDermott, as the platoon's exhausted sergeant. Mr. Vance is particularly fine. The narrative picks up weight and momentum every time he comes on the screen. Also good is Tegan West, who plays yet another young, raw lieutenant who must depend on the patience of his men.

Though Mr. Hanson ("Bad Influence," "The Bedroom Window") is a slick movie maker, he is not an especially persuasive one here.

It's a frenetic farce that takes the form of a folksy study of Smalltown, U.S.A., where there is no problem that can't eventually be solved on top of a bed, in a bath.

Mr. Duvall, Miss Danner and Mr. O'Keefe are the main reasons you should see The Great Santini. They play together with the kind of ease and self-assurance that, in a movie, is as exhilarating as it is rare.

The Big Picture, the first theatrical film to be directed by the talented Christopher Guest (a co-writer and a star of ''This Is Spinal Tap), is a consistently genial, intermittently funny send-up of the current Hollywood scene as demonstrated by the rise and fall of an award-winning film student.

Conversation Piece is a disaster, the kind that prompts giggles from victims in the audience who, willingly, sit through it all feeling as if they were drowning in three inches of water.

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

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

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]

The film tries to cover too much ground, even though Calder Willingham's script eliminates or telescopes events and characters from the Berger novel.

Though the film was photographed on what appear to have been extremely difficult locations in Louisiana and Texas, it never once convinces you that it's anything but pretentious moviemaking.

An elaborately produced, mostly charmless adventure-comedy that intends to make fun of a kind of romantic fiction that's one step removed from what the movie is all about.

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.

The movie is massive, shapeless, often unexpectedly moving, confusing, sad, vivid and very, very long.