Vincent Canby

It's aggressive in its ineptitude. It grates on the nerves like a 78 rpm record played at 33 rpm.

A big, convoluted, entertainingly dizzy romantic mystery melodrama.

A very well made, disorienting movie about inarticulated despair and utter hopelessness. It reminds me a lot of ''Over the Edge,'' Jonathan Kaplan's bleak, bitter picture of teen-age life in an architecturally perfect, California housing development. Unlike ''Over the Edge,'' however, The Boys Next Door is less interested in causes than in effects, which Penelope Spheeris, the director, turns into the photographic record of a grim, vivid, joyless ride to hell.

All of the performances are limited by the material and, in the case of Mr. Stoltz, by Michael Westmore's quite spectacular makeup. The exception - and the film's best sequence - occurs when Rusty's very middle-class, well-meaning parents, played by Estelle Getty and Richard Dysart, come to visit. In these few, brief minutes, Mask becomes specific and interesting. Otherwise it's the kind of story that would work better as a television feature.

Watching the film is like listening to someone use a lot of impressive words, the meanings of which are just wrong enough to keep you in a state of total confusion, but occasionally right enough to hold your attention. What is he trying to say? It takes a little while to realize that maybe the speaker not only doesn't know but doesn't even care to think things out.

Bergman creates a stunning picture not only of personal anxiety but also of the fury that may exist just below the surface of any perfect state.

There are some pleasant things in Saint Jack, but there are few surprises, except for the fact that either the movie's editor or Mr. Bogdanovich, who directed the film and wrote the screenplay with Howard Sackler and Paul Theroux (based on the novel by Mr. Theroux), hasn't found a simple way to indicate the passage of time.

One-fourth of the film is so brilliant—and so brilliantly acted by Dustin Hoffman—that it helps cool one's impatience with the rest of the film, which is much more fancily edited and photographed but no more profound than those old movie biographies Jack L. Warner used to grind out about people like George Gershwin, Mark Twain and Dr. Ehrlich.

The structure of the movie is so loose that a narrator (Victor Jory) must be employed from time to time to explain the plot, as if it were a serial. Most surprising in a movie that obviously cost a good deal of money is the sloppy matching of exterior and studio photography with miniature work for special effects.

Meant to be funny, but it only swells the sinus passages. It is a painfully inept comedy.

More problematical is the tone of the film, which attempts to be both compassionate and goofy, though the events are funny only if they are seen as farcical.

Fool for Love has several exceptional things going for it, namely the performances by Mr. Shepard as Eddie, Kim Basinger as May and Harry Dean Stanton as the Old Man.

The Gods Must Be Crazy is so genial, so good-natured and, on occasion, so inventive in its almost Tati-like slapstick routines, that it would would seem to deny the existence of any racial problems anywhere.

Miss Streep dives into this thimble-sized comedy and makes one believe - at least, while she is on the screen - that it is an Olympic-sized swimming pool of wit.

Attention must be paid when a movie is as aggressively awful as Harry and the Hendersons, though it's so pin-headed that it could be the last of its inbred line. It's not likely to spawn.

Heroes, co-starring Henry (The Fonz) Winkler and Sally (The Flying Nun) Field, brings to the motion-picture theater all of the magic of commercial television except canned laughter. Well, no truly rotten movie is perfect. Harrison Ford, who may be one of the most-seen movie actors of the day because of his role in Star Wars, is effective in a supporting role too small to make the picture worth seeing.

Mr. Boorman takes these myths very seriously, but he has used them with a pretentiousness that obscures his vision.

''The Color of Money'' isn't ''Mean Streets'' or ''Raging Bull.'' It is, however, a stunning vehicle - a white Cadillac among the other mainstream American movies of the season.

A cheerful, inoffensive fantasy in which such attractive live actors as Steve Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy play second fiddle to machinery that, in this case, means No. 5, designed by Syd Mead and engineered and realized by Eric Allard.

A consistently engrossing melodrama, modest in its aims and as effective for the cliches it avoids as for the clear eye through which it sees its working-class American lives.

An expensive stylistically bankrupt suspense melodrama.

There are some comparatively calm spots in the film, here and there, but they don't count. If anything, they allow you to catch your breath. Sleeper is terrific.

It's a see-through movie composed of a lot of clanking, silly, melodramatic effects that, like rib-tickling, exhaust you without providing particular pleasure, to say nothing of enlightenment.

It's not giving away state secrets to report that Rocky finds that success has made him fat and that to triumph again, he has to learn to be ''hungry.'' Rocky's problem is thus not that of America in the 80's but more like America in the affluent 60's and early 70's.

Come the end of the year, Above the Law may well rank among the top three or four goofiest bad movies of 1988.

A charming, witty meditation upon fakery, forgery, swindling and art, a movie that may itself be its own Exhibit A.

The great satisfaction of Mad Dog and Glory is watching Mr. De Niro and Mr. Murray play against type with such invigorating ease. Each is the other's straight man, a relationship that is hilariously set up in the initial encounter of the cop and the hoodlum.

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.