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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    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Vincent Canby
    Le Pont du Nord
    It's another example of the ever-widening gap between the real world and the fantasies of a kind of artistic temperament more concerned with random self expression than with the expression of coherent feelings or ideas about love, alienation, outrage, politics or even of movie-making. It shrivels the imagination instead of enriching it. [7 Oct. 1981]
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Vincent Canby
    The Day of the Locust
    Its grossness—its bigger-than-life quality — is so much a part of its style (and what West was writing about) that one respects the extravagances, the almost lunatic scale on which Mr. Schlesinger has filmed its key sequences.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Vincent Canby
    Norma Rae
    Norma Rae is a seriously concerned contemporary drama, illuminated by some very good performances and one, Miss Field's, that is spectacular.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 70 Vincent Canby
    Warlock
    Warlock is unexpectedly entertaining, having been concocted with comic imagination by D. T. Twohy, who wrote the screenplay, and Steve Miner, the director.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Vincent Canby
    La Cage aux Folles
    La Cage aux Folles is naughty in the way of comedies that pretend to be sophisticated but actually serve to reinforce the most popular conventions and most witless stereotypes.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    The Natural
    Mr. Levinson, who both wrote and directed Diner, the small, exquisitely realized comedy about growing up aimless in Baltimore, here seems to be at the service of other people's decisions. Though entertaining in short stretches, The Natural has no recognizable character of its own.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    Eyewitness
    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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    The Manhattan Project
    Mr. Brickman, who directed the film and wrote the screenplay (with Thomas Baum), has a real gift for eccentric comedy and characters. The Manhattan Project, with its vaguely populist leanings, isn't crazy enough. Mr. Brickman fails to make big issues comprehensible. He just makes them small.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    Hammett
    Hammett, the first major American movie by Wim Wenders, isn't quite the mess one might expect, considering the length of time it's been in production and the number of people who seem to have contributed to it. It's not ever boring, but heaven only knows what it's supposed to be about or why it was made. One answer would serve both questions.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Slap Shot
    The performances—which have a lot to do with the right casting, particularly in the smaller roles—are impeccable. Paul Newman maintains an easy balance between star and character-actor. The leading-man authority is there, but it's given comic perspective by the intensity of the character and by its tackiness, evident even in the clothes he wears.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Vincent Canby
    The Return of the Pink Panther
    The screenplay is funny but even better are the sight gags that are a kind of inventory of everything Clouseau has been unable to master in his long, irrelevant career.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    The Assassination Bureau
    Like an old electric automobile, the movie rolls forward, without surprises, steadily and almost soundlessly, except for the bomb explosion on the soundtrack. It's never as funny as it looks, but it's a pleasant enough ride if you like your companions.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    Red Heat
    Red Heat is a topically entertaining variation on the sort of action-adventure nonsense that plays best on television. Mr. Hill's touch is heavy when he takes himself seriously. However, he has a real gift for instantly disposable fantasy.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Vincent Canby
    Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson
    In place of narrative drive it relies, on the momentum created by ‐ its visual spectacle, its prodigal way with ideas, its wit and its enthusiasm for the lunatic business of making movies.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    Cat People
    Miss Kinski and Mr. McDowell are most effective - eerie and damned -and Mr. Heard is stalwart and self-effacing as the mere human who stumbles onto the truth and forever guards the secret.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    The Big Chill
    The Big Chill represents the best of mainstream American film making. It's a reminder that the same people who turn out our megabuck fantasies are often capable of working even more effectively on the small, intimate scale of The Big Chill.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    Coming Home
    Strong, stinging triangle of two Vietnam vets and one wife.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Urban Cowboy
    Urban Cowboy is the most entertaining, most perceptive commercial American movie of the year to date. Here is a tough-talking, softhearted romantic melodrama that sees a world that is far more bleak than the movie, or the characters in it, ever have time to acknowledge.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    Raggedy Man
    Raggedy Man is something like a country-and-western ballad that relates a supposedly sad, melodramatic story but whose simple, repetitive, upbeat rhythms effectively deny the awfulness of the events being sung about.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Vincent Canby
    The Eagle Has Landed
    A good old-fashioned adventure movie that is so stuffed with robust incidents and characters that you can relax and enjoy it without worrying whether it actually happened or even whether it's plausible.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    Angel Heart
    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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Vincent Canby
    Topaz
    Topaz is not only most entertaining. It is, like so many Hitchcock films, a cautionary fable by one of the most moral cynics of our time.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Vincent Canby
    Lenny
    One-fourth of the film is so brilliant—and so brilliantly acted by Dustin Hoffman—that it helps cool one's impatience with the rest of the film, which is much more fancily edited and photographed but no more profound than those old movie biographies Jack L. Warner used to grind out about people like George Gershwin, Mark Twain and Dr. Ehrlich.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Pale Rider
    This veteran movie icon handles both jobs with such intelligence and facility I'm just now beginning to realize that, though Mr. Eastwood may have been improving over the years, it's also taken all these years for most of us to recognize his very consistent grace and wit as a film maker.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    Goodbye, Mr. Chips
    Should it survive—and I suspect it will — it will be largely because of the restrained, affectingly comic performance of Peter O'Toole in the title role. Everything else in this British public-school romance is either out of symmetry or out of date.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    King Kong
    It's a series of big, foolish but entertaining spectacle scenes.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Vincent Canby
    The Comfort of Strangers
    Mr. Schrader is a director of great rigor and discipline. The movie is fascinated by the baroque behavior it observes, but without imitating it.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Vincent Canby
    Biloxi Blues
    Biloxi Blues, carefully adapted and reshaped by Mr. Simon, is a very classy movie, directed and toned up by Mike Nichols so there's not an ounce of fat in it.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    The Monster Squad
    A silly attempt to crossbreed an Our Gang comedy with a classic horror film, which usually means that both genres have reached the end of the line.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Vincent Canby
    Cahill U.S. Marshal
    Cahill, United States Marshal was directed by Andrew V. McLaglen and written by Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink. Perhaps recognizing the new limitations of their star, they spend a good deal of time trying to turn a conventional Western into a children-in-peril movie.
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