NEW YORK– The life of Vincent Canby, the longtime New York Times senior film critic who died last week at 76, is being called "an overlong, poorly paced mess" by filmmakers. "Mr. Canby's life builds glacially, taking an excruciating 21,549,600 minutes to reach the part in which he finally begins writing for the Times," said director Roland Joffe, whose 1986 film The Mission was panned by Canby as "a singularly lumpy sort of movie." "The life then completely falls apart in its final third, with Canby retiring in the most anticlimactic manner possible before an inevitable death scene as awash in bathos as any you're likely to see."