Vincent Canby

As free in form as it is generous of spirit.

Swept Away is less a film about ideas than about previous commitments, for which neither character can be held completely accountable. The enormous appeal of the comedy has to do with the way, briefly, each character, is able to overcome those commitments.

Cat's Eye is pop movie making of an extremely clever, stylish and satisfying order.

A fascinating, slightly chilly picture — as well as one of the best Preminger films in years.

It's also absolutely jam- packed with the kind of symbols that delight Freudian analysts of culture, particularly of folk tales.

THE RIGHT STUFF, Philip Kaufman's rousing, funny screen adaptation of Tom Wolfe's book about Project Mercury and America's first astronauts, is probably the brightest and the best rookie/cadet movie ever made, though the rookies and cadets are seasoned pilots and officers.

Naked is as corrosive and sometimes as funny as anything Mr. Leigh has done to date. It's loaded with wild flights of absurd rhetoric and encounters with characters so eccentric that they seem to have come directly from life. Nobody would dare imagine them.

A genial, gently mocking, brilliantly executed spoof that may offend the purists but which should delight the buffs.

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.

At its best, which it frequently is, it's a lunatic ball, an extremely genial, witty example of what is becoming a movie genre all its own.

It's a marvelous attempt to recreate a kind of farce that, with the notable exceptions of a handful of films by Blake Edwards and Billy Wilder, disappeared after World War II.

A big, brave, stouthearted, sometimes romantic, sometimes silly melodrama with the kind of visual sweep you don't often find in movies anymore.

The film is superbly acted by Mr. Polanski, Mr. Douglas and Miss Winters, who might not be entirely convincing as a Parisian concierge in a realistic film, but who fits into this nightmare perfectly.

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 suspense-horror film of unusual psychological intelligence and wit.

Though Nela's is a spiritual journey, Mr. Pintilie dramatizes it in the bitter ways of social satire. The movie has the tempo of cabaret theater. It is wildly grotesque, shocking and sometimes very funny. The details are vivid.

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.

Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now lives up to its grand title, disclosing not only the various faces of war but also the contradictions between excitement and boredom, terror and pity, brutality and beauty. Its epiphanies would do credit to Federico Fellini, who is indirectly quoted at one point.

A good, substantial horror film with such a sense of humor that it never can quite achieve the solemnly repellent peaks of Roman Polanski's "Repulsion."

Alien 3 belongs to that branch of fantasy comics, best exemplified by the "Road Warrior" movies, in which the iron and space ages meet for dizzy results.

The Heartbreak Kid occasionally goes for laughs without shame (which is what has always bothered me about Simon's brand of New York comedy), but behind the laughs there is, for a change, a real understanding of character — which is something that I suspect, can be attribued to Miss May.

A couple of sequences in the middle of the movie just mark time, but usually everything works, to make Nashville the most original, provocative high‐spirited film Mr. Altman has yet given.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.