Vincent Canby

A magical mixture of recollection, parody, memoir, satire, self-examination and joyous fantasy.

Thieves Like Us is such an engaging, sharply observed account of a long-lost time, and of some of the people who briefly inhabited it, that I hope it doesn't get confused with other films that seem, superficially anyway, to have covered the same territory.

The Empire Strikes Back is not a truly terrible movie. It's a nice movie. It's not, by any means, as nice as "Star Wars." It's not as fresh and funny and surprising and witty, but it is nice and inoffensive and, in a way that no one associated with it need be ashamed of, it's also silly.

Miss Livingston's interviews reveal a way of living that is both highly structured and self-protective.

An elegant conundrum, a private‐eye film that has its full share of duplicity, violence and bizarre revelation, but whose mind keeps straying from questions of pure narrative to those of the hero's psyche.

The biggest, longest, most expensive Leone Western to date, and, in many ways, the most absurd... Granting the fact that it is quite bad, Once Upon the Time in the West is almost always interesting, wobbling, as it does, between being an epic lampoon and a serious hommage to the men who created the dreams of Leone's childhood. (Review of Original Release)

The trouble with My Life as a Dog is that too often it imposes an alien sensibility upon the boy, requiring that he behave in a way that adults can too easily identify as charming. My Life as a Dog is a movie with a split point of view.

Superman is good, clean, simple-minded fun, though it's a movie whose limited appeal is built in.

The idea is funnier than the execution. Miss Goldberg is only funny when she is being foul-mouthed, which seems rude since no one else is allowed to respond in kind or degree.

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.

There are times when it appears that Solarbabies might be sending itself up. All of the time, it's an embarrassment.

It raises the spirits not by phony sentimentality but by the amplitude of its art. From time to time, it is also roaringly funny... A terrific movie. [1 Oct 1993, p.C1]

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.

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.

Horton Foote's funny, exquisitely performed film adaptation of his own play, directed for the screen by Peter Masterson. The Trip to Bountiful is almost as unstoppable as Carrie Watts.

Something Wild is often "Something Wrong."

Mr. Beresford and Mr. Uhry, working in concert, see to it that the essential spirit of Driving Miss Daisy shines through the sometimes deadening effects of literalism.

Paris, Texas begins so beautifully and so laconically that when, about three-quarters of the way through, it begins to talk more and say less, the great temptation is to yell at it to shut up. If it were a hitchhiker, you'd stop the car and tell it to get out.

Sweetie looks like a small movie, and in every measurable way it is, but it possesses remarkable strength and tenacity.

James Bridges's smashingly effective, very stylish suspense melodrama.

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.

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]

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.

Miss May is a witty, gifted, very intelligent director. It took guts for her to attempt a film like this, but she failed.

The result is a movie that is both spooky and sexy.

In 9 1/2 Weeks, he has created a work that might well qualify as a truly nouveau film. Here is a movie in which actors impersonating characters are blended into the decor so completely that they take on the properties of animated products, no more or less important than exquisitely photographed strawberries.[21 Feb 1986, p.C17]

Stuffed with plummy English accents and the most inauthentic classroom scenes since those of "Billy Madison," Life, Translated has a childlike innocence that seems targeted toward a preteenage audience.

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.