Vincent Canby

Streisand never plays to or with the other actors. She does A Star Is Born as a solo turn. Everybody else is a back‐up musician, which is okay when she's belting out a lyric, but distinctly odd when other actors come into the same frame.

Unfortunately the plot thickens so rapidly and so lumpily that one very soon loses interest in spite of the quite stunning and gory special effects.

This isn't to say that this particular extravaganza, directed by Frank Oz, is in the same super league as The Muppet Movie and The Great Muppet Caper. This may be only an impression, based on the fact that the past always looks greener than the present, but The Muppets Take Manhattan seems just a little less extraordinaire than the two other features. [13 July 1984, p.C10]

As wild as the premise is, Under Siege is almost guiltily enjoyable.

There is a nonstop series of cheerfully low jokes that, as usual, are best when in very poor taste, about beautiful women, body functions and minorities, including homosexuals.

Roger Donaldson's White Sands is set entirely in the vast painterly landscapes of the American Southwest, but it means to be a suspense thriller reflecting the scaled-down undercover realities of the post-cold-war era. In fact, it's almost as difficult to follow as the politics of the federation that replaced the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and as difficult to remember as that federation's official name.

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.

Mr. Caan is generally convincing, except in those classroom scenes, but all of the other actors, with the exception of James Sorvino who plays a sympathetic bookie, seem defeated by the quality of the material.

The Double Life of Veronique doesn't end. About three-quarters of the way through, it starts to dissolve, like mist, so that by the time it is actually over the screen seems to have been blank for some time.

The comic possibilities of this are generally ignored in Brian Taggert's screenplay and the direction of George P. Cosmatos, which features about as many shots from the point of view of the rat as of Bart Hughes.

Mr. Parker is an eclectic film maker. He seems to have no readily identifiable obsessions that define supposedly more serious directors. He's a very able technician who needs a good screenplay, which is what's missing here.

The film covers the main events of the Orton life in a manner that is nothing less than distracted. One has little understanding of the fatal intensity - and need - that kept Orton and Halliwell together.

The details are minutely observed and, to me, just a bit boring.

Escape to Witch Mountain is a Walt Disney production for children who will watch absolutely anything that moves...It's not very scary, but neither is it very exciting.

Serie Noire,' adapted by Mr. Corneau and Georges Perec from ''A Hell of a Woman'' by the late Jim Thompson, takes itself much too seriously, as is the way with humorless French adapters of American fiction of this sort.

To watch it is to try to put together the pieces from three different jigsaw puzzles. Not everything fits. [19 June 1980, p.19]

It's also one of those movies that is itself so lethargic that one welcomes its so-called shock moments not because they are scary but because they indicate that not everyone behind the camera has been napping. You don't dread the possibility of something jumping out from behind the door. You long for it.

The Day of the Dolphin is not a movie with much personality of its own.

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 all goes decisively wrong when Jerry Schatzberg, the director, and Garry Michael White, who wrote the screenplay, decide to saddle the pair with a poetic vision that suddenly makes everything needlessly phony.

The movie is based on characters that originally appeared in DC Comics, and means to be funnier than it ever is. It almost achieves its comic goal in one scene in which Swamp Thing and Heather Locklear, as Mr. Jourdan's innocent stepdaughter, attempt to consummate a love that cannot be. The film is otherwise composed entirely of special effects that alternate with whimsy.

Though Mr. Van Damme's collaborators have become more upscale and mainstream, Nowhere to Run remains your basic exercise in kick-him-in-the-groin, stab-him-with-a-pitchfork cinema politics.

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

Much of the laughter Mr. Brooks inspires is hopeful, before-the-gag laughter, which can be terribly tiring...Blazing Saddles has no dominant personality, and it looks as if it includes every gag thought up in every story conference. Whether good, bad, or mild, nothing was thrown out.

It takes a long while for The Paper Chase to disintegrate, and there are some funny, intelligent sequences along the way, but by the end it has melted into a blob of clichés.

Firefox is only slightly more suspenseful than it is plausible. It's a James Bond movie without girls, a Superman movie without a sense of humor.

Having been handed a script that, at its best moments, is a wan though benign reminder of the original version of The Thing, Mr. Schepisi seems uncertain whether to distract the audience's attention by decor or to send up the cliches of a certain kind of science-fiction. Unfortunately, he plays it straight most of the time. [16 May 1984, p.17]

I suspect that another, tougher director might have made something quite interesting of the same script.