Vincent Canby

The movie grows more and more desperate until it seems to go to pieces like poor brilliant Bagley. The final madness has less to do with wit than with a cinematic effect. The film's good humor, however, is consistent.

The problem with "Nicholas and Alexandra" is not inflation, but deflation, the attempt to cram too big a picture into too small a frame.

The Dark Half is an exceptionally entertaining film of its kind. Only Stanley Kubrick has ever adapted a King novel (The Shining) in such a way that the ending remains as satisfyingly spooky as the beginning.

Bad Influence is full of sharply observed subsidiary characters and details of dress and behavior. Among other things, they help ease one past the plot's point of no return.

Bustin' Loose is not unbearable, though a soft-hearted Richard Pryor is not a terribly funny Richard Pryor.

A velvety-smooth looking romantic mystery melodrama that has far less to do with life than with other movies. It's clever but chilly in the way of something with a mechanical heart.

At its best, Shoot the Moon is as spare and as sharp in its detail as fine prose and as continuously surprising.

It is a movie without a single thought in its head, but its action sequences are so ferociously staged that it's impossible not to pay attention most of the time.

When eventually, as it must, the story makes its demands on the characters, things slow down considerably. However, The Secret of My Success still leaves you with a good feeling about the idiocies of Big Business.

Mr. Lester's interpretation of The Three Musketeers looks like an evening in a bump-o-car arena, with magnificently costumed people in place of cars. The adventures are less swashbuckle than slapstick.

Yet for all its evident talent, Of Mice and Men is not very exciting. It could be that looking back at Lennie and George with the perspective of time robs them of their urgency. There's no surprise left.

Yanks never succeeds, however, in making these three stories urgent or especially moving.

The most offputting thing about such canny, tear-stained movies as The Champ is not their naïveté but their unholy sophistication. These movies don't mean to deal with the world as it really is, but as it should be, a place where there's no pile-up of emotional garbage too big that it can't be washed clean by a good cry.

Like Faces, which was rambling and funny and accurate, and which I admired, the new film demonstrates a concern for panicky, inarticulate squares that is so unpatronizing that it comes close to being reverential in a solemnly religious sense. Husbands, however, also puts one's tolerance of simulated cinéma vérité to the test. It is almost unbearably long.

Movies as clumsy, tasteless and self-righteous as this are worse than merely boring. By exploiting the tragedies of real people, some wildly fictionalized, The Voyage of the Damned attempts to turn them to profit without giving them any measure of the respect that is due.

Patty Hearst is a model of swift, spare, unsentimental film making about a character who can never be known, as most fictional characters are, and about a specific time and circumstances that, with hindsight, seem incredible.

A remarkable piece of work. [30 June 1989]

More than any other film Nichols has made, Carnal Knowledge reminds me of his stage work at its best, particularly of the highly stylized Luv in which low comedy techniques were employed to illuminate material that might otherwise seem too cruel, or too anti‐heroic for a dramatic medium.

The Dead Pool, possesses a couple of good jokes, but nothing can disguise the fact that it's a mini-movie in the company of a mythic figure.

Mr. Zieff demonstrates great skill in keeping the gags aloft and in finding new ways by which to free the laughs trapped inside old routines about latrine duty, war games, forced marches and calisthenics. [10 Oct 1980, p.C6]

I don't automatically object to contemporary allusions, but I prefer to find them myself, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller is so busy pointing them out to us that the effect is to undercut its narrative drive and the dignity of its fiction.

Written and directed by Walter Hill, who once wrote and directed a good movie, Hard Times, with Charles Bronson. This one is not good. It is Awful Movie. It is Pretentious Movie. It is Silly Movie. It talks just like this.

Invigorating.

The Fog is constructed of random diversions. There are too many story lines, which necessitate so much cross-cutting that no one sequence can ever build to a decent climax. The movie looks quite pretty but prettiness of this sort is beside the point in such a film.

It's very easy to make it sound funnier than it ever is. Like ''Caddyshack'' and ''National Lampoon's Vacation,'' which Mr. Ramis also directed, and like ''Animal House'' and ''Ghostbusters,'' which he also wrote in part, Club Paradise is full of funny ideas that are never adequately developed. The best it can offer are successful one-liners....The movie is painless, and everybody associated with it is good company, but considering the obvious effort and the expense that went into it, the result should have been much, much better.

Though small in physical scope, Reservoir Dogs is immensely complicated in its structure, which for the most part works with breathtaking effect. [23 Oct 1992]

The screenplay is stitched together from variations on cliches used by or about the medical community.

From the moment you read the ads for Tora! Tora! Tora! ("The Most Spectacular Film Ever Made!”), you are aware that you're in the presence of a film possessed by a lack of imagination so singular that it amounts to a death wish.

Everyone treats his material with the proper combination of solemnity and good humor that avoids condescension. One of Mr. Lucas's particular achievements is the manner in which he is able to recall the tackiness of the old comic strips and serials he loves without making a movie that is, itself, tacky.

It's a series of big, foolish but entertaining spectacle scenes.

It's also full of lyrical slow-motion footage of women athletes' training - jogging, sprinting, running the high hurdles, throwing the shot, broad jumping and high jumping. These sequences are accompanied by not-great pop music that has been poured over the images in a way that suggests fudge sauce on top of fried chicken.

Another elaborately produced, brutal, all-too-jocular adventure film, which cost so much money that it's difficult to take it as lightly as it means to be taken. There's something deeply unpleasant about seeing this many millions of dollars being spent to such paltry purpose.

A charmless feature-length joke about the world's most elaborate speed trap.

With the exception of Miss Streep's performance, the pleasures of Out of Africa are all peripheral – David Watkin's photography, the landscapes, the shots of animal life – all of which would fit neatly into a National Geographic layout.

Part 2 has been compiled with the kind of intelligence and affection that allow us to get some purchase on the Hollywood history made by M-G-M without spending our whole lives at the job.

Not since "Love Story" has there been a movie that so shrewdly and predictably manipulated the emotions for such entertaining effect.

A mushy movie with occasional, isolated moments of legitimate comedy, all provided by Mr. Scott with an assist by Mr. Goldman, whose sense of humor seems to surface in peripheral incidents only.

The 1986 film all others will have to beat for sheer, unashamed, hilariously vulgar vaingloriousness.

It's not that the movie runs out of steam long before it has gone on for two hours and 33 minutes, but that we have figured it out and become increasingly dumbfounded.

A suspense melodrama made by people whose talent for filmmaking and knowledge of international affairs would both fit comfortably into the left nostril of a small bee.

There is something eerily disconnected about Heaven Can Wait. It may be because in a time of comparative peace, immortality — at least in its life-after-death form — doesn't hold the fascination for us that it does when there's a war going on, as there was in 1941 when Here Comes Mr. Jordan was released and became such a hit. Or perhaps we are somewhat more sophisticated today (though I doubt it) and comedies about heavenly messengers and what is, in effect, a very casual kind of transubstantiation seem essentially silly.

A profoundly simple, profoundly moving film.

This ravishing and witty spectacle invades the mind through eyes that are dazzled without ever being anesthetized

Steel Magnolias is pop entertainment of an especially condescending, superficial sort. Its bitchiness and greeting-card truisms are made no more palatable by the fact that Mr. Harling probably wrote it with as much sincerity and passion as Mr. Shepard put into "Fool for Love."

An enjoyable paperback of a film, a lightweight, breezy experience that, by never pretending to be anything more than what it is, disarms criticism.

The story, as well as Peter Yates's direction of it, is juvenile without being in any attractive way innarcent, but the underwater sequences are nice enough, alternately beautiful and chilling. The shore‐based melodrama is as badly staged as any I've seen since Don Schain's “The Abductors” (1972), which is to remember incompetence of stunning degree.

The Thing is too phony looking to be disgusting. It qualifies only as instant junk.

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.

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.

Not since "Howard the Duck" has there been a big-budget comedy with feet as flat as those of Joe Versus the Volcano. Many gifted people contributed to it, but there's no disbelieving the grim evidence on the screen.

Straight Time is not a movie to raise the spirits. It is so cool it would leave a chill were it not done with such precision and control that we remain fascinated by a rat, in spite of ourselves.

Bopha! is so firmly grounded in physical reality (it was shot in Zimbabwe), in the looks and passions of its characters, even in its music, that its deliberate progress from one obligatory scene to the next still carries surprising emotional weight.

When the film's focus is on labor history, remembered or recreated, it is extremely moving. Fortunately this is most of the time.

The movie, which is simultaneously arrogant and timorous, has been unable to separate the important material from the merely colorful.

The over-all production is very handsome, and the performances fine, especially Newman, Redford, and Miss Ross, who must be broadly funny and straight, almost simultaneously.

That The Mirror Crack'd never builds up much momentum has less to do with Guy Hamilton's direction and the performances than with the screenplay by Jonathan Hales and Barry Sandler, which promises more sophistication than it ever delivers.

I must say that I found it interesting (even when it approached the ludicrous) because of its place in relation to other Siegel films and because I have nothing but appreciation for the performers.

Steven Spielberg's giant, spectacular Close Encounters of the Third Kind...is the best—the most elaborate—1950's science fiction movie ever made, a work that borrows its narrative shape and its concerns from those earlier films, but enhances them with what looks like the latest developments in movie and space technology.

Though it's as foolish as the first film, is rather more fun to watch and sometimes very stylish-looking.

The movie has the fuzzy focus of someone who has stared too long at a light bulb. Narrative points aren't made and the wrong points are emphasized. It could also be that too much footage was shot so that, when the time came for editing, a lot of essential material had to be cut out.

Scrooged works in fits and starts. The mundane demands of the sentimental story keep interrupting what are, essentially, revue sketches, a few of which are hilarious.

The screenplay for A Cry in the Dark, adapted by Robert Caswell and Mr. Schepisi from a book by John Bryson, isn't perfect, but it provides Miss Streep with the kind of raw material that allows her to create a character who, while being perfectly ordinary, is always unexpectedly special.

All of this is by way of being the prelude to the film's extended, funny and moving final sequence, a spectacular feast, the preparation and execution of which reveal Babette's secret and the nature of her sustaining glory.

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.

The Big Picture, the first theatrical film to be directed by the talented Christopher Guest (a co-writer and a star of ''This Is Spinal Tap), is a consistently genial, intermittently funny send-up of the current Hollywood scene as demonstrated by the rise and fall of an award-winning film student.

American Pop is a dazzling display of talent, nerve, ideas (old and new), passion and a marvelously free sensibility. The man may well be a genius, though that sort of pronouncement will have to wait on time.

The film sounds pretty silly, and it is, but it's not painful to watch. Harley Cokliss, the director, and John Carpenter, Desmond Nakano and William Gray, who wrote the screenplay, never allow credibility to worry them, or even those of us in the audience. Like a stolen car, it moves pretty fast, if erratically. It has a tendency to put Quint into impossible situations from which he walks away with unexplained ease.

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.

It is full of smiles, punctuated here and there by marvelously unseemly guffaws, but most of the time it works its little wonders quietly.

This may sound like heresy, but The Exorcist III is a better and funnier (intentionally) movie than either of its predecessors.

Bride of Re-Animator is less a sequel to the critically praised 1985 horror film Re-Animator than a rehash based on the same H. P. Lovecraft stories.

The symbolism here is dream-book basic.

The film has no consistent vision. Even worse, it's not very funny.

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.

The Last Emperor is like an elegant travel brochure. It piques the curiosity. One wants to go. Ultimately it's a let-down.

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.

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.

The only remarkable thing about Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II is the insistent manner in which it recalls how much better his original film was...Even if Part II were a lot more cohesive, revealing, and exciting than it is, it probably would have run the risk of appearing to be the self-parody it now seems.

Here is a thoroughly genial movie, a combination of A.A. Milne, Busby Berkeley and a small bit of Blake Edwards.

An elaborately produced, mostly charmless adventure-comedy that intends to make fun of a kind of romantic fiction that's one step removed from what the movie is all about.

Strong, stinging triangle of two Vietnam vets and one wife.

The movie is perfectly cast, from Trintignant and on down, including Pierre Clementi, who appears briefly as the wicked young man who makes a play for the young Marcello. The Conformist is flawed, perhaps, but those very flaws may make it Bertolucci's first commercially popular film. (Review of Original Release)

The River has a meticulously detailed physical production and, from time to time, is acted with passion by its cast. Yet its ideas are so profoundly muddled that the film must run mainly on sentimentality.

Though House of Games is not of the dramatic heft of the playwright's ''American Buffalo'' and ''Glengarry Glen Ross,'' the screenplay is the first true Mamet work to reach the screen, and the direction illuminates it at every turn. Both Miss Crouse and Mr. Mantegna and the supporting actors, including Mike Nussbaum, J. T. Walsh and Steve Goldstein, are splendidly in touch, not only with character but also with the sense of the film.

Though in his last movie, Code of Silence, Mr. Norris, the karate champion-turned-movie actor, seemed on the verge of becoming a kind of benign Clint Eastwood character, he loses all credibility in this awful film.

With the exception of Nicholson, its good things are familiar things - the rock score, the lovely, sometimes impressionistic photography by Laszlo Kovacs, the faces of small-town America.

The movie's attitude toward the mentally and emotionally disturbed is even worse. If Crazy People displayed an ounce of real wit, one wouldn't care, but it's so smug in its ignorance that it begins to look elitist.

With the exception of Mr. Strasberg and Mr. Levene, the actors are as hysterical as their material. The screenplay has one funny exchange. Other than that, the screenplay and the direction are a complete muddle.

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.

Herzog's film seems well worth the effort to me. It's funny without being silly, eerie without being foolish and uncommonly beautiful in a way that has nothing to do with mere prettiness.

Although Compromising Positions is supposed to be a comedy and a mystery, the film's comedy is of such a high order that the rather ordinary question of the identity of the murderer seems to be interruptive of Mr. Perry's and Miss Isaacs' otherwise nastily funny, suburban satire. Reduced to its essentials, Compromising Positions is ''Nancy Drew and the Case of the Dissembling Dentist.''... A very entertaining film.

1941 is less comic than cumbersome, as much fun as a 40-pound wrist-watch.

The performances are terrible—thin and overwrought in the manner of actors trying to improvise without an idea in their heads.

The Fury was directed by Brian De Palma in what appears to have been an all-out effort to transform the small-scale, Grand Guignol comedy of his Carrie into an international horror/spy/occult mind-blower of a movie. He didn't concentrate hard enough, though.

Reds is an extraordinary film, a big romantic adventure movie, the best since David Lean's ''Lawrence of Arabia,'' as well as a commercial movie with a rare sense of history.

"E.T." is as contemporary as laser-beam technology, but it's full of the timeless longings expressed in children's literature of all eras.

Mr. Allen's most securely serious and funny film to date.

It's Gary Busey's galvanizing solo performance that gives meaning to an otherwise shapeless and bland feature-length film about the American rock-and-roll star who was killed in a plane crash in 1959.

My 20th Century, a new Hungarian film written and directed by Ildiko Enyedi, is a number of wondrous things. It's a bracing combination of wit, invention, common sense and lunacy. It's a gravely comic meditation on civilization at the turn of this century. It's also about light and shadow and electricity, Thomas Alva Edison, movies and what it's like to be Hungarian in a world where no one is quite sure where Hungary is.

Mr. Forman has preserved the fascinating heart of Mr. Shaffer's play, and made it available to millions who might never enter a legitimate theater. Well done.

This "Prelude to a Kiss" is not only without charm and wit, but it's also clumsily set forth: many people seeing it may wonder what, in heaven's name, is going on.

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.

Unforgiven... never quite fulfills the expectations it so carefully sets up. It doesn't exactly deny them, but the bloody confrontations that end the film appear to be purposely muted, more effective theoretically than dramatically.

The most depressing thing about this Godard work is that it seems so tired, familiar and out of date. The movie's 1960's-ish worship of film as an end in itself, which was a mark of so many earlier, more ebullient Godard movies, now is lifeless.

The members of the cast are undercut by both material and direction.