Vincent Canby

''The Color of Money'' isn't ''Mean Streets'' or ''Raging Bull.'' It is, however, a stunning vehicle - a white Cadillac among the other mainstream American movies of the season.

A consistently engrossing melodrama, modest in its aims and as effective for the cliches it avoids as for the clear eye through which it sees its working-class American lives.

There are some comparatively calm spots in the film, here and there, but they don't count. If anything, they allow you to catch your breath. Sleeper is terrific.

A charming, witty meditation upon fakery, forgery, swindling and art, a movie that may itself be its own Exhibit A.

Life Is Sweet, a title that should not be taken as irony, demands that the audience accept its meandering manner without expectations of the big dramatic event or the boffo laugh. It is very funny, but without splitting the sides.

As Lucy Honeychurch, Miss Bonham Carter gives a remarkably complex performance of a young woman who is simultaneously reasonable and romantic, generous and selfish, and timid right up to the point where she takes a heedless plunge into the unknown.

Bracing...Withnail and I isn't social history. It's about growing up, almost as if by accident. It's also genuinely funny.

Mr. Fonda gives one of the great performances of his long, truly distinguished career. Here is film acting of the highest order, the kind that is not discovered overnight in the laboratory, but seems to be the distillation of hundreds of performances.

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."

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)

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.

It goes beyond the impartiality of journalism. It has the manner of an official report on the spiritual state of a civilization for which there is no hope.

Mr. Crichton's previous films as a director — "Westworld" and "Coma" — are skillful and, each in its own way, entertaining, but they give no hint of the amplitude he displays in this visually dazzling period piece. With Sean Connery as the gang's elegant leader, the sort of mastermind who denies his body nothing, Lesley-Anne Down as his magnificent moll, and Donald Sutherland as his locksmith —"the best screwsman in England" — The Great Train Robbery is classy entertainment of the sort I associate exclusively with movies.

It's sexy and explicitly crude, entertaining and sometimes very funny. It's his most blatant variation to date on a Hitchcock film ("Vertigo"), but it's also a De Palma original, a movie that might have offended Hitchcock's wryly avuncular public personality, while appealing to his darker, most private fantasies.

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.

Falling Down is the most interesting, all-out commercial American film of the year to date, and one that will function much like a Rorschach test to expose the secrets of those who watch it.

Unlike any other film Truffaut has ever made, yet only Truffaut could have made it. It is a lovely, pure film. And it may be a classic.

Very beautiful and the first truly interesting, American-made western in years.

One of the few good, truly funny American political comedies ever made.

Miss Denis's mastery of film-making technology, which is something that can be learned, is equaled by her splendid control of narrative, a more elusive talent. She is astonishing. There are no dark corners in the story. Everything that happens is vivid and clear, though subject to the kind of speculation that tantalizes and rewards.

GREASE is not really the 1950's teen-age movie musical it thinks it is, but a contemporary fantasy about a 1950's teen-age musical—a larger, funnier, wittier and more imaginative-than-Hollywood movie with a life that is all its own. It uses the Eisenhower era — the characters, costumes, gestures and particularly, the music—to create a time and place that have less to do with any real 50's than with a kind of show business that is both timeless and old-fashioned, both sentimental and wise. The movie is also terrific fun.

As played by Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks's funniest, most cohesive comedy to date, this Dr. Frankenstein is a marvelous addled mixture of young Tom Edison, Winnie-the-Pooh, and your average Playboy reader with a keen appreciation of beautiful bosoms.

Network can be faulted both for going too far and not far enough, but it's also something that very few commercial films are these days. It's alive. This, I suspect, is the Lumet drive. It's also the wit of performers like Mr. Finch, Mr. Holden, and Miss Dunaway.

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.

Nothing Miss Close has done on the screen before approaches the richness and comic delicacy of her work as the Marquise. [21 Dec 1988, p.C22]

So entertaining, so flip and so genially irreverent that it seems to announce the return of the great gregarious film maker whose "Nashville" remains one of the classics of the 1970's.

Mr. and Mrs. Bridge is wise and funny and just a little bit scary. Though it's an adaptation, it has the manner of a true original.

Greystoke is one of the most thoroughly enjoyable films of its kind I've ever seen.