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
    • 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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    The Last Detail
    The Last Detail is one superbly funny, uproariously intelligent performance, plus two others that are very, very good, which are so effectively surrounded by profound bleakness that it seems to be a new kind of anti-comedy. You'll laugh at it, not through your tears but with a sense of creeping misery.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Alice
    Woody Allen's marvelous new comedy, Alice, confirms Mr. Allen's safe arrival on a whole new plateau of film-making.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion [re-release]
    Although Mr. Petri quite consciously makes movies about ideas, he has, in his "Investigation," made a movie in which the ideas, and the man who seethes with them, have the shock and impact of the most fundamental kind of melodrama.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Kramer vs. Kramer
    Kramer vs. Kramer is densely packed with such beautifully observed detail. It is also superbly acted by its supporting cast, including Jane Alexander, Howard Duff and George Coe.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Missing
    Missing is Mr. Costa-Gavras's most beautifully achieved political melodrama to date, a suspense-thriller of real cinematic style, acted with immense authority by Jack Lemmon, as Charles Horman's father, Ed Horman, and Sissy Spacek as Charles's wife, Beth.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Richard III
    Of all Olivier's Shakespearean films, Richard III is, to my way of thinking, the most satisfying, the most surprising and - it has to be said - the funniest. [24 Apr 1981, p.C6]
    • The New York Times
    • 59 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    The Lover
    the film that Mr. Annaud and his producer, Claude Berri, have made is something of a triumph. It's tough, clear-eyed, utterly unsentimental, produced lavishly but with such discipline that the exotic locale never gets in the way of the minutely detailed drama at the center.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    The Silence of the Lambs
    All sorts of macabre things have gone on, and are still going on just offscreen, in Jonahan Demme's swift, witty new suspence thriller.[14 February 1991]
    • The New York Times
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Brother's Keeper
    It's a rich slice of Americana that would seem to belong to an earlier, pre-television era, except that television comes to play a large part in Delbert's story. It's also about an aspect of life in rural America that's seldom seen by people who drive through it, and seldom if ever glimpsed in movies.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Diva
    Though it means to be a romantic suspense-thriller, it has the self-consciously enigmatic manner of a high-fashion photograph, the kind that's irresistible to amateur artists who draw mustaches on the perfectly symmetrical faces of pencil-thin models in sables.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    The Man Who Would Be King
    The movie, which was shot in Morocco, looks lovely and remote (how did we ever once settle for those black-and-white Hollywood hills?) and has just enough romantic nonsense in it to enchant the child in each of us.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Salesman
    It’s such a fine, pure picture of a small section of American life that I can’t imagine its ever seeming irrelevant, either as a social document or as one of the best examples of what’s called cinema verite or direct cinema.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
    Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is an American comedy of the sort of vitality that dazzles European film critics and we take for granted. It's full of attachments and associations to very particular times and places, even in the various regional accents of its characters. It's beautifully written (by Robert Getchell) and acted, but it's not especially neatly tailored. [29 Jan 1975]
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Assault on Precinct 13
    Assault on Precinct 13 is a much more complex film than Mr. Carpenter's Halloween, though it's not really about anything more complicated than a scare down the spine. A lot of its eerie power comes from the kind of unexplained, almost supernatural events one expects to find in a horror movie but not in a melodrama of this sort.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Much Ado About Nothing
    He has taken a Shakespearean romantic comedy, the sort of thing that usually turns to mush on the screen, and made a movie that is triumphantly romantic, comic and, most surprising of all, emotionally alive.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Monty Python and the Holy Grail
    Monty Python and the Holy Grail...is a marvelously particular kind of lunatic endeavor.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Serpico
    It is galvanizing because of Al Pacino's splendid performance in the title role and because of the tremendous intensity that Mr. Lumet brings to this sort of subject. (Review of Original Release)
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Down by Law
    The excitement of Down by Law comes not from what it's about. Reduced to its plot, it is very slight. But the plot isn't the point. The excitement comes from the realization that we are seeing a true film maker at work, using film to create a narrative that couldn't exist on the stage or the printed page of a novel.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Scarface
    Scarface is the most stylish and provocative - and maybe the most vicious - serious film about the American underworld since Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather."
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Repo Man
    The real thing. It's a sneakily rude, truly zany farce that treats its lunatic characters with a solemnity that perfectly matches the way in which they see themselves.
    • 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.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Annie Hall
    There will be discussion about what points in the film coincide with the lives of its two stars, but this, I think, is to detract from and trivialize the achievement of the film, which, at last, puts Woody in the league with the best directors we have.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Matewan
    There's not a weak performance in the film, but I especially admired the work of Mr. Cooper, Mr. Tighe, Miss McDonnell, Miss Mette, Mr. Gunton, Mr. Strathairn and Mr. Mostel. They may be playing Social-Realist icons, but each manages to make something personal and idiosyncratic out of the material, without destroying the ballad-like style.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Love Story
    It looks to be clean and pure and without artifice, even though it is possibly as sophisticated as any commercial American movie ever made.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Intervista
    A magical mixture of recollection, parody, memoir, satire, self-examination and joyous fantasy.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    The King of Comedy
    It would be difficult to describe Martin Scorsese's fine new film, The King of Comedy, as an absolute joy. It's very funny, and it ends on a high note that was, for me, both a total surprise and completely satisfying. Yet it's also bristly, sometimes manic to the edge of lunacy and, along the way, terrifying.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    Fat City
    Huston's affection for life's eccentrics, as well as its rejects and misfits, is Legendary—so much so that it has sometimes seemed as if he had cast his films as if running a mission. In Fat City he has kept himself under control. The result is one of the three or four most beautifully acted films seen so far this year.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Vincent Canby
    The Boys Next Door
    A very well made, disorienting movie about inarticulated despair and utter hopelessness. It reminds me a lot of ''Over the Edge,'' Jonathan Kaplan's bleak, bitter picture of teen-age life in an architecturally perfect, California housing development. Unlike ''Over the Edge,'' however, The Boys Next Door is less interested in causes than in effects, which Penelope Spheeris, the director, turns into the photographic record of a grim, vivid, joyless ride to hell.
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