Vincent Canby

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.

Mr. Brooks's screenplay overstates matters both at the beginning of the film and at the end, with a prologue that strains to be cute and an epilogue that is just unnecessary. In between, however, the movie is a sarcastic and carefully detailed picture of a world Mr. Brooks finds fascinating and also a little scary.

It's also an ensemble piece acted to loopy perfection by a remarkable cast headed by Judy Davis, Sydney Pollack, Mia Farrow, Juliette Lewis, Liam Neeson and Mr. Allen, who's also the writer, director and ringmaster, as well as his own best friend.

A vastly entertaining movie. It's also one of such recognizably serious concerns that you can sink into it with pleasure and count it a cultural achievement.

One of John Huston's most original, most stunning movies. It is so eccentric, so funny, so surprising and so haunting that it is difficult to believe it is not the first film of some enfant terrible instead of the 33d feature by a man who is now in his 70's and whose career has had more highs and lows than a decade of weather maps.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is so beautifully acted and so well set (in and around Boston's pool halls, parking lots, side-streets, house trailers and barrooms) that it reminds me a good deal of John Huston's Fat City. It also has that film's ear for the way people talk—for sentences that begin one way and end another, or are stuffed with excess pronouns.

For all of the laughter in "Traffic," there are moments when the banal utilitarianism of the super-highway is seen as a work of extraordinary art.

There is beauty in Kagemusha but it is impersonal, distant and ghostly. The old master has never been more rigorous. [06 Oct 1980, p.14]

A comedy that can't quite support its tragic conclusion, which is too schematic to be honestly moving, but it is acted with such a sense of life that one responds to its demonstration of humanity if not to its programmed metaphors.

The manners and methods of big-city newspapering, beautifully detailed, contribute as much to the momentum of the film as the mystery that's being uncovered. Maybe even more, since the real excitement of All The President's Men is in watching two comparatively inexperienced reporters stumble onto the story of their lives and develop it triumphantly, against all odds.

From start to finish, this exhilarating adaptation of Richard Condon's phantasmagorical and witty novel -set inside the world of the Mafia - ascends, plunges and races around hairpin curves, only to shoot up again and dive over another precipice. [14 June 1985, p.C8]

Here is an American film, in Japanese with English subtitles, written, directed and photographed by Americans, made in Japan with a Japanese cast, which attempts to reveal the spiritual mysteries of a quintessentially Japanese phenomenon. That it doesn't succeed is almost a foregone conclusion. What is surprising, however, is that Mishima is as tolerable as it is, given all the strikes against it.

Even when he's not in an anarchic mood, Woody Allen is still the funniest neurotic in American movies today and Play It Again, Sam, directed by Herbert Ross from Allen's screenplay, will probably remain the funniest new movie around this summer until another Allen work shows up.

It looks to be clean and pure and without artifice, even though it is possibly as sophisticated as any commercial American movie ever made.

Homicide, which refers to metaphorical as well as literal murder, may be Mr. Mamet's most personal and deeply felt work. It's also his most blunt and despairing. Both "House of Games" and "Things Change" deal with conspiracies of some sort. Yet the scam that is the center of this film is unconvincing.

Has a number of other virtues that make it a surprisingly painless adventure. Among these are the screenplay by Bill Lancaster, Burt's son, who has the talent and discipline to tell the story of The Bad News Bears almost completely in terms of what happens on the baseball diamond or in the dugout.

It stars Julie Andrews, Robert Preston and James Garner, each giving the performance of his and her career in a marvelous fable about mistaken identity, sexual roleplaying, love, innocence and sight gags, including one that illustrates the dangers of balancing yourself on a champagne bottle on one finger within the range of a singing voice that shatters glass.

The reason the film prompts laughter, and finally elation, is not because it's jolly or has any feel-good words to live by. It's because of the utterly demonic skill with which these foulmouthed characters carve one another up in futile attempts to stave off disaster.

The care that Mr. Friedkin and Mr. Blatty have taken with the physical production, and with the rhythm of the narrative, which achieves a certain momentum through a lot of fancy, splintery crosscutting, is obviously intended to persuade us to suspend belief. But to what end? To marvel at the extent to which audiences will go to escape boredom by shock and insult.

A small, joyful lark of a film.

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.

It's the achievement of Mr. Malle, the director of Atlantic City, Pretty Baby and a lot of other very fine, conventional movies, that he has successfully turned his two real-life personalities into actors capable of representing themselves.

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.

What the film demonstrates most obviously is that when there is this much plot on the screen, there isn't time for actors to develop anything much in the way of plausibility of characterization.

A marvelously rambling frontier fable packed with extraordinary incidents, amazing encounters, noble characters and virtuous rewards.

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.

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)

Equinox Flower—a particularly inscrutable title even for this great Japanese director—is one of Ozu's least dark comedies, which is not to say that it's carefree, but, rather, that it's gentle and amused in the way that it acknowledges time's passage, the changing of values and the adjustments that must be made between generations.