Jay Carr

Ultimately, charm prevails. Enchanted April can be thought of as "Shirley Valentine" in quadruplicate, with better clothes. You won't see a more exquisite, more civilized feel-good movie this year. [7 Aug 1992, p.32]

Too bad The Kid gets bogged down in its sentimental manipulations. It has more going for it than you might suppose.

Denys Arcand has satiric fun with the media's way of taking celebrity culture at face value and nothing but. Eventually, though, the film becomes what it's ridiculing.

The best thing about the new film of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine is the machine.

It's a snazzy, smartly made, and even hip little scarefest. As a jump-start to Halloween, it's all you could hope for.

Kinetic, fizzy, delivering more bounce to the ounce than anything out there right now, "Rumble in the Bronx" is my kind of mindless fun. [23 Feb 1996]

Funny, gritty, filled with surprising stabs of feeling, Parenthood is a stretch for Ron Howard, its director. This new adult comedy has the generosity of "Cocoon" and "Splash," but it takes Howard into deeper, darker, messier territory. [2 Aug 1989, p.57]

There's always something touching about the diligence with which Schwarzenegger soldiers through his assignments. There's a play of intelligence and decency in his eyes that exists quite independently of his bashing. Of the Hollywood tribe of virile fists, he's the one who seems most sensitive. [17 Jun 1988, p.31]

Could have been -- and should have been -- richer and more resonant. It's Hollywood Babylon Lite, only TV movie-deep. But at least it's tangy.

It's more than science, more than biography, more than metaphor. Fusing all three and linking them to a profound human dimension that never cheapens the man or his macrospeculations, it ties them to shared human destiny. As Morris' elliptical style circles and deepens its themes with each pass, A Brief History of Time turns into film's own expanding universe. [14 Sep 1992, p.50]

Runs dry amid the cactus and sagebrush, but Graham's cartoony take on angelic unstoppableness makes us not mind so much.

In the end, it's much ado about not very much, certainly not enough to catapult Bass into a film career, but probably enough to satisfy 'N Sync fans.

Living in Oblivion needs more shoot-the-works outrageousness. But even if it thins out, it has an engaging spirit, bright energies and a wry feel for the clashing agendas on the set filled with edgy, starry-eyed pit bulls trying to convince themselves that what they're doing is a career move. [21 July 1995, p.46]

Fresh, original, and arresting.

It's poetic, resonant, wistful, convulsive, regretful, exultant. There also are times when it's demanding to sit through, when time passes slowly, urged on only by flickers of uncertainty on the face of its protagonist, or by his insistent peering after meanings that may not even exist. But it's also a film that offers the kinds of rewards possible only to the contemplative mindset. [25 Jun 1999, p.D5]

With its hypnotic performance by Rooker as Henry, it's most terrifying not in its carnage (although that's terrifying enough), but when it forces us to confront our own blinkered passage through the world, our blindness to the closeness of violent death. [5 Jan 1990, p.69]

The film is content to remain at the level of the mildly entertaining, with no real surprises and not much sass. [04 Dec 1992]

Solid B-level stuff, better than most filmed King novels. [27 Aug 1993, p.81]

My Cousin Vinny is a cement-handed courtroom comedy that somehow lands on its feet when it should fall on its face. In fact, it does fall on its face, more than once. There isn't a single thing in it that you don't know isn't coming. But the chemistry between Joe Pesci as a wiseguy-out-of-water and Marisa Tomei as his shrewd and adorable Brooklyn girlfriend, adrift in the Alabama legal system, keeps it worth watching. [13 Mar 1992, p.28]

A solid, humane, old-fashioned film in the best sense of the term.

Director Penny Marshall's choreography encompasses emotional as well as physical ebbs and flows. Awakenings lives up to its title. [11 Jan 1991]

Quest for Camelot is easy to sit through and reasonably entertaining. Certainly it should satisfy its target audience. But Warner really needs to journey more boldly toward a personality of its own and offer a real alternative. [15 May 1998, p.D5]

Quite apart from wringing the last molecule of vividness from his freewheeling roster of loose cannons, he brings to his direction of Martin a finesse shared by only a few of the directors who have worked with the comedian-actor.

The gusto in the flying bullets, the fleeing lovers, and the flowing music will make you want to hang around until the party is over.

Gray's haunted, obsessional riffs are absorbing theater. Because Demme had the good sense to lay back and not beat them over the head with his cameras, they're equally compelling on film. [27 Mar 1987]

Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep is a spicy, propulsive, invigorating paradox - a French film of great gusto about the exhaustion of French film culture. Written in 10 days and shot in four weeks with a very busy Super 16mm camera, it looks and plays as breathlessly as its on-the-fly circumstances. [27 July 1997, p.C8]

State of Grace is a high-powered, luxuriantly textured Irish gang movie that you keep watching, convinced that at any moment it's going to come together and really grab you. It doesn't. [05 Oct 1990, p.45p]

"Chances Are is a sweetly likable little romantic comedy that would be even more likable if it didn't require the season's most massive suspension of disbelief. [10 March 1989, p.32]

For all its Himalayan aspirations, "Little Buddha" is shallow and superficial.[25 May 1994, p.69]

It's a wickedly inventive blend of revisionist history and childhood dread. [17 March 1989, p.45]

You keep waiting for it to go into orbit, to be really fizzy and outrageous, like the screwball farce it wants to be. Instead, the film settles for the merely serviceable.

Here's a good, honorable, but not great anti-apartheid movie, the first directed by a black woman. A Dry White Season unravels when it opts for a wrap-up-the-loose-ends thriller finish, but there's no faulting the level of acting or the level of commitment in it. [17 Sept 1989, p.B4]

It's too psychically flat and dramatically inert. Instead of reinvigorating a Hollywood classic, Burton only takes it to camp.

If there is any message in Tarkovsky's work, although as a poet he would never stoop to anything as banal as a message, it is that life is an internal affair, played out in one's soul, not in public.

Part of the reason for the comic surehandedness is the obvious chemistry between Shannon, Ferrell, and director Bruce McCulloch.

Fireworks is anything but the usual cop thriller. It's a piercing meditation on mortality, with a heartbroken tough guy at its center. [20 Mar 1998, p.C8]

Director Kevin Reynolds has difficulty stitching his material together and imparting to it a workable rhythmic scheme, making it more than once seem earthbound. This isn't the Robin Hood it could have been. Its pulse is too erratic. Still, it does give us a handsome and often entertaining new take on Sherwood Forest's most famous straight arrow. [14 June 1991, p.29]

It isn't conventional drama or plot twists that make After Life moving. Rather, it's the exquisitely tender memories that come floating to the surface of this or that interviewee's mind. [11 June 1999, p.D6]

Intoxicating fun.

There are laughs in it. But mostly you sit around waiting for it to be funnier, or at least funny more often. The problem is that it hasn't figured out a way to be funny while satisfyingly accommodating the pain in these characters.

The script and direction are her real enemies here. Sleeping with the Enemy is a vehicle with too many manufacturing defects. [08 Feb 1991, p.39p]

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael is sweet but dumb and clumsily executed, with its central character overdrawn and undermined, and the adults mostly written off as geeks. What the film needs is some of the troublemaking spunkiness Roxy showed when she left town. [12 Oct 1990, p.30p]

Little more than a screenful of boy meets boy, boy meets baggage, boy loses baggage.

Except for a few coups de style, Amateur is a screenful of cool nothingness. [05 May 1995]

They're as special as special effects get.

Magnolia is "Short Cuts" with hope. It's my kind of mess.

Isn't even worth a glance.

There's no Passion in this psychological drama.

More than any of the sappy writing ever does, their collective presence reminds us that any church is about community. The film is tired and trite, but they're terrific, every last one of them. [10 Dec 1993, p.53]

Bob Roberts not only invigorates a climate polluted by the usual presidential campaign bombast; it quickens the hearts of the disillusioned by reminding us that the left needn't always forfeit the bare-knuckled approach. [14 Sep 1992, p.47]

Best when it's playful, toying with the fact that the Mafia has in a single generation been transmogrified from myth to joke.

Derivative and flawed. But it does throw off a few sparks.

It's one of the year's most unforgettable exercises in pointlessness. [16 Sept 1994, p.62]

Swimming with Sharks is fine when it puts Buddy into outrageous play. But it stumbles in a few other places, requiring a pretty hefty suspension of disbelief - first at Guy's making it into his miserable job that many would kill for, then when he finds himself on the receiving end of romantic attentions. [09 June 1995, p.57]

One of the big problems with Romeo Is Bleeding is its voiceovers. Gary Oldman, as the crooked cop protagonist, drowns in them like quicksand. [4 Feb 1994, p.54]

Botches the chance to delve into the personality of a complex, alluring, and free-spirited woman.

The reason to sit through its uninspired, formulaic moves, however, is its half-dozen spectacular fight sequences.

A crass, witless knockoff of better films.

Takes on provocative and stimulating subject matter, but can't bring it into satisfying dramatic focus, stranding three strong actors who are superior to their material.

You won't see a more humane and delicately moving riff this year on the theme of getting clean.

Smart, unpredictable, and alive with the energies of actors who clearly are enjoying being stretched by their material.

Village of the Damned has everything you want in a horror movie but the horror. [28 Apr 1995, p.90]

Mother's peace crusade ennobles Irish Town.

Takes a vacation from quality.

The film often settles for the sentimental and the anecdotal rather than trying for something richer and deeper, but on those levels it works well enough. Audiences will relate to its warmth and sincerity. Essentially, the film is a series of pages from Levinson's family album and it means something to us because it clearly means something to him. [05 Oct 1990, p.45p]

All Dogs Go to Heaven" has the right spirit, and its warmth will offset what for small kids might be some scary moments. But it does seem skimpy and warmed over. [17 Nov 1989]

Certainly none of Olivier's other contemporary film characters matches Archie's resonances. We're lucky to still have The Entertainer. [04 Aug 1989, p.41]

Daring to be low-key and even a little old-fashioned, Wide Awake is a well-intentioned film that steers clear of cheap sentimental miracles and reassuringly holds out a vision of growth and healing measured in small steps. [27 Mar 1998, p.D8]

Just enough laughs to keep you watching.

Satisfying in every respect, it's a piece of blue-collar chamber music, never treating the characters cheaply, allowing them a complex entwinement of emotions.

Consumerism is running more amok than ever, but this satire of it isn't.

Far and Away is a throwback to the handsome but stodgy historical romances Hollywood used to make, and it can at least be said that it's more ambitious than most of what we'll see this summer. [22 May 1992]

Deeper and richer in humanity than all but a handful of the American films released this year.

Both a lovingly crafted remembrance of things past and a deliberate broadening and darkening of the canvas Levinson previously filled in "Diner," "Tin Men," and "Avalon."

When the chemistry isn't there - and it mostly isn't - the actors and film seem merely self-indulgent, despite the obvious devotion with which She's So Lovely was made. [29 Aug 1997, p.C3]

Its breadth, profundity, and stunningly rendered vision make idealism seem renewed and breathtaking again.

Part of the reason Pet Sematary is so pedestrian is that its leads - Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby - are uncharismatic. And director Mary Lambert, of Siesta and music video fame, doesn't know how to build and pace her material. [21 Apr 1989, p.46]

It's a spirited and essentially optimistic film, but it's also simplistic.

It's too fragmented and diffuse to ever bring its parts together in any really satisfying manner.

Sentimental and has its heart on its sleeve, but never heavy-handedly so, and its delicacy and tenderness will get to you if you give it half a chance.

Like its subject, Pollock is a messy creation, but one whose depth of commitment and high attack keeps it on track.

Beyond its fresh twists on the cop and romance genres, Witness is, above all, an anti-consumption film. [08 Feb 1985]

The surehandedly wrought, beautifully acted, almost unbearably tense In the Bedroom is a rare film, not to be missed.

Before long, it runs out of steam, playing like the pilot for a TV sitcom called "Baby Knows Best." [13 Oct 1989, p.37]

Awful in ways that are just clever enough often enough to make it intermittently watchable.

The most fascinatingly self-revelatory Hitchcock film of all...Vertigo is so dreamy, so druggy, that when it does actually introduce a dream scene, it seems excessive, jarring. And if Hitchcock was able to pick up on Stewart's capacity for relentlessness, he also exploited that side of Stewart's persona that told America it was watching a decent, homespun, plain-spoken guy. Stewart's character gets away with telling Novak who and what to be because he is able to convince us he is, at bottom, an innocent himself - and a victim. [25 Oct 1996, p.C10]

Executed on a pretty broad level, but if characterization is slighted, the ensemble is so rich, with such depth, that every few minutes another juicy turn keeps coming our way to divert us.

Everything you could want in a sequel. It satisfyingly regenerates the characters and qualities that made the first film so popular. And then it moves them forward into newer, fresher, more elaborate, more involving territory.

As narrative, the film doesn't quite work, but as a pungent ethnic scrapbook filled with eccentricity and deadpan humor, The Plot Against Harry is a treasure chest of quirkiness. [20 Sep 1989, p.82]

To get right to it, Wim Wenders' Faraway, So Close isn't anywhere near as sublime and magical as his "Wings of Desire." In fact, his new film about angels is sort of a mess, collapsing under the weight of too much plot and too little poetry. That being said, I hasten to add that it's my kind of mess. [28 Jan 1994, p.47]

A sweet, gentle film with a personality problem. The problem is that it hasn't got enough personality to keep from being overwhelmed by the echoes of other films it evokes. [21 July 1989, p.21]

Presumed Innocent is interesting to the extent that it goes beyond the usual whodunit and courtroom drama formulas and shows how nobody really has clean hands. [27 July 1990, p.29P]

Sweetly macabre charmer.

Jingle All the Way packs into its queasy bag everything we've learned to dread about the so-called holiday season. If it doesn't bring on an attack of Seasonal Affective Disorder, nothing will. [22 Nov 1996, p.E6]

It's funny and charming most of the time, thanks to Brenda Blethyn.

Honeymoon in Vegas is a sweet but tepid comedy so short on real goofiness that when you do encounter some, you tend to be inordinately grateful. [28 Aug 1992, p.49]

There are times when it moves into the guilty pleasure zone.

As a film, it's as crass and awful as the house guests from hell to which it so unwarrantedly feels superior. How bad is Madhouse? Bad enough to make a critic think that the similarly themed National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is art, right down to its fried cat. [16 Feb 1990, p.87p]