Vincent Canby

Mr. Mann may well become a very good theatrical film maker but, among other things, he's going to have to learn how to edit himself, to resist the temptation to allow dialogue that is colorful to turn, all of a sudden, into deep, abiding purple. Time after time scenes start off well and slip into unintentionally comic excess.

Wind is not commonplace movie making. The sailing sequences, including one short, very funny race off Newport involving the kind of small boats you and I might sail, surpass anything I've ever seen on the screen. There are collisions at sea, wrecked spinnakers and freak accidents, like the one during a race when a sailor finds himself hanging upside down from the mast as the other boat gains. These things exhilarate as they threaten to stop the heart.

There are times when Texasville, like the Larry McMurtry novel on which it is based, seems top heavy with eccentrics. Everybody is tirelessly and (worse) lovably oddball. The snappy dialogue occasionally exhausts. Yet also like the book, the movie becomes seriously involving, a cockeyed acknowledgment of an especially American kind of inarticulate despair.

Monty Python's the Meaning of Life is funny but, being unreasonable, I wish it were funny from start to finish.

A big, awkward, crazily ambitious, sometimes breathtaking motion picture that comes as close to being a popular epic as any movie about this country since "The Godfather."

Time Bandits is a cheerfully irreverent lark - part fairy tale, part science fiction and part comedy. It's a fantastic though wobbly flight through history and legend in the company of a small boy named Kevin and six dwarfs named Randall, Fidgit, Wally, Og, Stutter and Vermin.

The movie is extremely long (two hours and 34 minutes) and so slow that by the end you feel as if you've been standing up even if you've been sitting down.

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.

A witty, relaxed lark. It's a movie to raise your spirits even as it dabbles in phony ones.

It's a nasty, biased, self-serving movie that also happens to be hilarious most of the time.

A virtually uninterrupted series of smiles.

The Big Red One, for all its uncompromising brutality, is viscerally, angrily alive. Fuller was lucky to survive the war. It is our good fortune that this film, a tribute to his luck (and to those who did not share it), has come back to life.

Up the Academy sets out to offend almost everybody, including women, blacks, homosexuals, Arabs, the military, and so on, but they've all been more efficiently offended by other, better movies.

A Kiss Before Dying is not Crime and Punishment. It is pop movie making to be enjoyed without guilt.

The movie, which directed by Alan J. Pakula, never rewards the attention we give it with anything more substantial than a few minor shocks.

Mr. Beresford and Mr. Uhry, working in concert, see to it that the essential spirit of Driving Miss Daisy shines through the sometimes deadening effects of literalism.

No other performer (Jack Nicholson) in an Antonioni film, except Jeanne Moreau in "La Notte," has so gracefully submitted to Mr. Antonioni and survived intact. (Review of Original Release)

All of the performances are terrible, but Joseph Porro's costume design is arresting. Mr. Van Damme and the other prisoner look as if they had been outfitted by an upscale outlet of a Banana Republic-type men's boutique.

Mr. Frye's initial conceits are good ones, but the film's humor somehow gets sopped up by the spongy writing and direction. The characters are fuzzily realized. The dialogue is lame and the continuity so shaky that one entire subplot sinks in confusion.

Put them all together and you have complete confusion, a movie without any identity whatsoever.

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.

An uproarious display of brilliance, nerve, dance, maudlin confessions, inside jokes and, especially, ego.

The movie seems to have been planned, written, acted, shot and edited by people who were constantly being overruled by other people. It's totally lifeless.

A thoroughly delightful but far from plausible mystery melodrama that operates exclusively on high spirits and a no-nonsense intelligence that is never sidetracked by coherence.

It is high comedy of a sharp, bitter kind, and Michael Murphy is fine as the weasel husband named Martin, but Miss Clayburgh is nothing less than extraordinary in what is the performance of the year to date.

Even as sequels go in this era of movie mega-series, The Karate Kid Part II peters out faster than most.

The movie plows through one outrageous sequence to the next with the momentum of a freight train.

Peter Bogdanovich and his screenwriter, Alvin Sargent, who adapted Joe David Brown's novel, have set out to make a bittersweet comedy that is both in the style of thirties movies and about the thirties. They evoke the time (1936) and the place (rural Kansas and Missouri) so convincingly that their rather sweet formula story seems completely inadequate, even fraudulent.