Vincent Canby

Watching Children of a Lesser God, the screen adaptation of Mark Medoff's 1980 Broadway play, is like being on a cruise to nowhere aboard a ship with decent service and above-par fast-food. Everything has been carefully programmed so that there are no surprises, no discoveries, nothing to do except to sit -with eyes propped open - and applaud the crew's efficiency.

Mr. Almodovar's comic invention runs out too soon, leaving the audience to giggle weakly in anticipation of the big laughs and disorienting shocks that never arrive.

The details are minutely observed and, to me, just a bit boring.

An action melodrama that doesn't trust its action to speak louder than words.

Time Bandits is a cheerfully irreverent lark - part fairy tale, part science fiction and part comedy. It's a fantastic though wobbly flight through history and legend in the company of a small boy named Kevin and six dwarfs named Randall, Fidgit, Wally, Og, Stutter and Vermin.

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.

With its screenplay adapted from Rostand by Mr. Rappeneau and Jean-Claude Carriere, the movie is really memorable, though, only for the Depardieu performance, and for the chance it gives us to hear the original French verse.

It's more cheerful than funny, and so insistently ungrudging about Americans and Japanese alike that its satire cuts like a wet sponge.

It's an especially American kind of social comedy in the way that great good humor sometimes is used to reveal unpleasant facts instead of burying them.

A big, expensive Western that doesn't contain one moment that might be called genuine.

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.

Midnight Cowboy often seems to be exploiting its material for sensational or comic effect, but it is ultimately a moving experience that captures the quality of a time and a place. It's not a movie for the ages, but, having seen it, you won't ever again feel detached as you walk down West 42d Street, avoiding the eyes of the drifters, stepping around the little islands of hustlers, and closing your nostrils to the smell of rancid griddles.

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.

Neither Mr. Attenborough nor John Briley, who wrote the screenplay, are particularly adventurous filmmakers. Yet in some ways their almost obsessively middle-brow approach—their fondness for the gestures of conventional biographical cinema—seems self-effacing in a fashion suitable to the subject. Since Roberto Rossellini is not around to examine Gandhi in a film that would itself reflect the rigorous self-denial of the man, this very ordinary style is probably best.

A witty, relaxed lark. It's a movie to raise your spirits even as it dabbles in phony ones.

Bombay is a place of noise, restless movement and no privacy whatsover. It is squalor accepted as the natural order of things, and thus accommodated. Miss Nair does not share this fatalism, but in ''Salaam Bombay!'' she allows us to examine it without panic, and without patronizing it. She is a new film maker to watch.

Firefox is only slightly more suspenseful than it is plausible. It's a James Bond movie without girls, a Superman movie without a sense of humor.

Poltergeist often sounds as if it had been dictated by an exuberant twelve-year-old, someone who's sitting by a summer campfire and determined to spin a tale that will keep everyone else on the edges of their knapsacks far into the night.

Hollywood's latest big-budget, high-concept, mass-market reworking of material not entirely fresh, has more endings than Beethoven's Fifth, but it's also packed with surprises, not the least being that it's a smashing work. It's vulgar, violent, funny and sometimes breathtakingly beautiful.

How each frees the other is the stuff of Free Willy, which is as engaging as such films can be without offering rude surprises.

A Brief History of Time is a kind of adventure that seldom reaches the screen, and it's a tonic.

Kubrick's harrowing, beautiful and characteristically eccentric new film about Vietnam, is going to puzzle, anger and (I hope) fascinate audiences as much as any film he has made to date... A film of immense and very rare imagination.

Glory is celebratory, but it celebrates in a manner that insists on acknowledging the sorrow. This is a good, moving, complicated film.

Police Story is of principal interest as a souvenir of another culture.

What we eventually see underneath this shell is not the study in dignity that Ashley Montagu wrote about, but something far more poignant, a study in genteelness that somehow supressed all rage. That is the quality that illuminates this film and makes it far more fascinating than it would be were it merely a portrait of a dignified freak. [03 Oct 1980, p.C8]

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.

Dracula has the nervy enthusiasm of the work of a precocious film student who has magically acquired a master's command of his craft. It's surprising, entertaining and always just a little too much.

James Foley's After Dark, My Sweet is a brisk, entertaining contemporary melodrama about the kind of sleazy characters who populated California crime literature 35 years ago. That's no surprise, since the screenplay, adapted by Robert Redlin and Mr. Foley, is based on Jim Thompson's novel, published in 1955.