Vincent Canby

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The New York Times
For 925 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 43% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 54% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 4.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Vincent Canby's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Victor Victoria
Lowest review score: 0 Revolution
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 405 out of 925
  2. Mixed: 405 out of 925
  3. Negative: 115 out of 925
925 movie reviews
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    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Vincent Canby
    Star 80
    Make no mistake about it: Miss Hemingway, a beauty who looks a lot like Miss Stratten, is not giving an impersonation but a true performance, as fully realized as the somewhat limited circumstances allow. There is an alertness, humor and intelligence to her work that immediately identifies her as one of our best young film actresses, someone who reinvents character in her own image rather than simply miming it.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    Bad Influence
    Bad Influence is full of sharply observed subsidiary characters and details of dress and behavior. Among other things, they help ease one past the plot's point of no return.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    Where Eagles Dare
    Where Eagles Dare is the ultimate metaphor. It encapsulates human experience into an ordered, comprehensible melodrama that is both absurd and entertaining.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Honeymoon in Vegas
    Honeymoon in Vegas is a virtually nonstop scream of benign delirium, pop entertainment as revivifying as anything you're likely to see this year. It's a romantic farce in which the explosion of the epically earnest and funny central situation creates shock waves that leave no person or thing untouched. Even the film's bit players and extras are funny.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Octopussy
    George MacDonald Fraser, Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson are responsible for the story and screenplay, which was directed by John Glen, who does much better than he did with "For Your Eyes Only." However, the material is markedly better, and the budget seems noticeably larger. Peter Lamont's production design is both extravagant and funny.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Vincent Canby
    Single White Female
    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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Vincent Canby
    Three Days of the Condor
    Fast, vivd espionage-betrayal thriller, dandy plot. [24 Sep 1975]
    • The New York Times
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    Who's That Knocking at My Door?
    The director, who also wrote the original story and screenplay, hasn't succeeded in making a drama that is really much more aware than the characters themselves. The result is a movie that is as precise—and as small—as a contact print.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Vincent Canby
    The Crazies
    An inept science-fiction film from George A. Romero, the Pittsburgh man who established himself as the Grandma Moses of exurban horror films with The Night of the Living Dead.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    How to Get Ahead in Advertising
    The movie grows more and more desperate until it seems to go to pieces like poor brilliant Bagley. The final madness has less to do with wit than with a cinematic effect. The film's good humor, however, is consistent.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    The Man from Snowy River
    To appreciate it fully, however, one must have a completely uncritical fondness for Kirk Douglas as he acts his heart out in two roles; for picturesque landscapes; for silly plots, and for dialogue that leans heavily on aphorisms too homespun to be repeated in a big-city newspaper.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Vincent Canby
    Tequila Sunrise
    The movie has the fuzzy focus of someone who has stared too long at a light bulb. Narrative points aren't made and the wrong points are emphasized. It could also be that too much footage was shot so that, when the time came for editing, a lot of essential material had to be cut out.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes
    Greystoke is one of the most thoroughly enjoyable films of its kind I've ever seen.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Vincent Canby
    Prelude to a Kiss
    This "Prelude to a Kiss" is not only without charm and wit, but it's also clumsily set forth: many people seeing it may wonder what, in heaven's name, is going on.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Vincent Canby
    The Human Factor
    A fascinating, slightly chilly picture — as well as one of the best Preminger films in years.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Vincent Canby
    Patty Hearst
    Patty Hearst is a model of swift, spare, unsentimental film making about a character who can never be known, as most fictional characters are, and about a specific time and circumstances that, with hindsight, seem incredible.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Vincent Canby
    The Bounty
    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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Vincent Canby
    Working Girls
    Working Girls, though a work of fiction, sounds as authentic as might a documentary about coal miners. The camera attends to the duties of the ''girls'' without apparent emotional response.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Harold and Maude
    As performers, they both are so aggressive, so creepy and off‐putting, that Harold and Maude are obviously made for each other, a point the movie itself refuses to recognize with a twist ending that betrays, I think, its life‐affirming pre tensions.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Vincent Canby
    Alligator
    A very funny meditation on the old ''what happens when you flush the goldfish down the john?'' nightmare. It is also a formula film that simultaneously demonstrates the specific requirements of the formula while sending them up with good humor.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Vincent Canby
    Quartet
    Almost always entertaining to watch and infuriatingly wrong in several important ways, chief among these being the casting of Miss Adjani as Marya.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Vincent Canby
    Last Exit to Brooklyn
    Though Last Exit to Brooklyn is bleak, the gloom is never trivial. The effect, instead, is elegiac.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Murder on the Orient Express
    Like the lovely, extravagantly overemphasized nineteen-thirties' costumes and production designed by Tony Walton, Murder on the Orient Express is much less a literal re-creation of a type of thirties movie than an elaborate and witty tribute that never for a moment condescends to the subject.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    Julia
    Mr. Sargent and Mr. Zinneman have amplified the story with solemn care, in good taste (which is not always desirable), and have come forth with a film that is both well-meaning and on the side of the angels but with the exception of a half-dozen scenes, lifeless.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    Dragnet
    Mr. Aykroyd and Mr. Hanks play well together, but the funniest performance in the film is that of Dabney Coleman, as the smut king (who lisps). Somewhat less diverting are the car chases and the time out necessary to explain the throwaway story.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    A Few Good Men
    A big commercial entertainment of unusually satisfying order. [11 Dec 1992]
    • The New York Times
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Vincent Canby
    The Front Page
    Even though the mechanics and demands of movie-making slow what should be the furious tempo, this Front Page displays a giddy bitterness that is rare in any films except those of Mr. Wilder. It is also, much of the time, extremely funny
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Vincent Canby
    S.O.B.
    It's a nasty, biased, self-serving movie that also happens to be hilarious most of the time.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Vincent Canby
    The Way We Were
    By, some peculiar alchemy, The Way We Were turns into the kind of compromised claptrap that Hubbell is supposed to be making within the film and that we're meant to think is a sellout. It is.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    The Postman Always Rings Twice
    Miss Lange is not a bad actress, but her miscasting is fatal to the picture and exemplifies its tiresomely genteel artfulness.
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