Vincent Canby

A fragmented, far from‐great movie, and it won't change cinema history, but in its own odd fashion it celebrates humdrum lives without ever resorting to patronizing artifice.

Life Is Sweet, a title that should not be taken as irony, demands that the audience accept its meandering manner without expectations of the big dramatic event or the boffo laugh. It is very funny, but without splitting the sides.

The scenery is pretty but the movie never makes one wish to be in it. Mr. Russell, a good, reliable actor, prompts a few smiles as the raffish, impossibly self-assured sailor who is always half tight. Mr. Short and Ms. Place also are attractive in spite of the dim material.

The film, written by John Elder and directed by Terence Fisher, is not without its intentional giggles. Compared with "Andy Warhol's Frankenstein," however, it is very straight and solemn, chock full of the old horror film values we don't see much of any more.

With their remarkable contributions, ''Baron Munchausen'' is full of moments that dazzle, just for the fun of seeing the impossible come to life on the screen. What the Folies-Bergere once was for the foot-weary tourist, ''Baron Munchausen'' is for the television-exhausted child. Nothing much happens, but you can't easily tear your eyes away from it.

The events in ''Manon of the Spring'' are no more wildly melodramatic than those in ''Jean de Florette'' but, without the indoctrination provided by ''Jean,'' the second film functions as a mean-spirited review of the first.

Its grossness—its bigger-than-life quality — is so much a part of its style (and what West was writing about) that one respects the extravagances, the almost lunatic scale on which Mr. Schlesinger has filmed its key sequences.

Ms. Pfeifer is lovely, the visual focal point of the film, but also much more. With her soft voice, her reserve and her quickness of mind, her Ellen has emotional weight. She's the film's heart and conscience. [17 Sept 1993, p.C1]

The Europeans isn't simply pretty, it's so relentlessly pretty it becomes almost boring to watch.

A good-natured lowbrow farce about two southern California garbage men who dream of opening their own surf shop.

The former lead singer of the Supremes is on-screen from start to finish, which is to say almost endlessly, but her only apparent limitations are those imposed on her by a screenplay and direction seemingly designed to turn a legitimate legend into a whopper of a cliché.

Mr. Scott directs the film as if he were trying to win a prize for demolishing a building in record time. The opening is good: stylish video images of a night football game played in a torrential rain, climaxed by the only scene in the film that has legitimate shock. After that, the brutality and the pace don't slacken, but interest does.

Diamonds Are Forever is great, absurd fun, not only because it recalls the moods and manners of the sixties (which, being over, now seem safely comprehensible), but also because all of the people connected with the movie obviously know what they are up to.

Desperately Seeking Susan, based on a good screenplay by a new writer named Leora Barish, is a terrifically genial New York City farce in which the lives of two very different young women become tangled in an Orlon web of lies, half-truths and cross purposes. Full of funny, sharply observed details, reflected in Santo Loquasto's witty production design as well as in all of the dozens of individual performances. The cast is virtually a Players Guide to the variety of performing talent available in New York.

In its stripped-down, cannily cinematic way, it's one of the most imaginative Australian films yet released in this country. It has no pretensions to do anything except entertain in the primitive, occasionally jolting fashion of the first nickelodeon movies, whose audiences flinched as streetcars lumbered silently toward the camera.

As cheerful and painless as not going to the dentist.

The film is technically sophisticated and emotionally retarded.

Shaft is not a great film, but it's very entertaining.

Topaz is not only most entertaining. It is, like so many Hitchcock films, a cautionary fable by one of the most moral cynics of our time.

Crowley has a good, minor talent for comedy-of-insult, and for creating enough interest, by way of small character revelations, to maintain minimum suspense.

Possibly the best work of any kind about the Vietnam War since Michael Herr's vigorous and hallucinatory book "Dispatches."

As in his last film, "Sorcerer," Mr. Friedkin seems bent on supplying us with more sociological information than is entirely necessary, whereas more information about the heist itself would have been welcome.

In much the way that Raymond stays detached, the performance seems to exist outside the film but, instead of illuminating Rain Man, it upstages the work of everyone else involved. [16 Dec 1988, p.C12]

I'm told by someone whose opinion I respect that the novel was very moving and very sad. The movie is not. It's science-fiction without gadgets, a horror film without thrills.

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.

Airport, the film version of Arthur Hailey's novel, is the sort of movie most people mean when they say Hollywood doesn't make movies the way it used to. This isn't just because Airport resembles any number of old Grand Hotel movies. Rather it's because it evokes our nostalgic feelings, not only for the innocence of old movies but also for the innocent old times in which we saw them.

As Lucy Honeychurch, Miss Bonham Carter gives a remarkably complex performance of a young woman who is simultaneously reasonable and romantic, generous and selfish, and timid right up to the point where she takes a heedless plunge into the unknown.

The Trail of the Pink Panther is less a conventional comedy than an uproarious retrospective devoted to the particular achievements of the Edwards-Sellers collaboration. Some of the routines seem totally new to me, and others are familiar, but either way, most of them are huge fun, and a couple approach greatness.