Vincent Canby

Chaplin is to serious biography, even to Mr. Attenborough's Gandhi, what unfortified cornflakes are to real food. It's slick packaging around what is mostly warm air.

So little goes on that it might be argued that The Burbs means to be a comment on the vacuity of popular entertainment in the television age, though it's much more an example of it. The film does nothing for the reputation of anyone connected with it, including Mr. Hanks, who deserves the Oscar nomination he has just received for his work in Big. This time he's attempting to act a role in a screenplay whose pages are blank.

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.

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.

Though the scenery can't be faulted, there's not a single funny or surprising moment in the movie. However, Blame It on Rio is not simply humorless. It also spreads gloom. It's one of those unfortunate projects that somehow suggests that everyone connected with the movie hated it and all of the other people involved.

It's another example of the ever-widening gap between the real world and the fantasies of a kind of artistic temperament more concerned with random self expression than with the expression of coherent feelings or ideas about love, alienation, outrage, politics or even of movie-making. It shrivels the imagination instead of enriching it. [7 Oct. 1981]

The film itself is invigorating - written, directed, and acted with enormous insight and comic elan. [27 Sept 1991]

What makes it so instructively entertaining is the pivotal character of Claus von Bulow, played by Jeremy Irons within an inch of his professional life. It's a fine, devastating performance, affected, mannerly, edgy, though seemingly ever in complete control. [17 Oct 1990]

A remarkable piece of work. [30 June 1989]

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]