Jay Carr

Whaley's self-effacing but strongly etched and wrenchingly effective film.

While no individual plot strand is vividly compelling, their interplay makes for a hearty and humanistic mix, carried by the performances.

With its sketchy characters, slick production values, frequent backlighting, smart pacing and effective half-light, this Body Snatchers is good if not great scare stuff. It's almost too efficient, too technological-looking to generate the kind of primal fears it wants. Still, those pods are nothing to sneeze at. They remain one of insomnia's greatest hits. [25 Feb 1994, p.48]

A gorgeous screenful of period eye candy.

The cinematic equivalent of a high, arching rainbow of a three-pointer from midcourt.

Poison Ivy isn't that much of a film. But part of its charm is that it doesn't pretend to be. It is, however, a great showcase for Drew Barrymore, as bad-news jailbait. [26 Jun 1992, p.29]

Warm, intelligent, humane, The Bear is everything you could hope for in an outdoor adventure. [27 Oct 1989, p.33p]

It's warmer and fuzzier than the first film, though every bit as tedious.

Hurtling from the screen with a vigor and importance that are all but absent from contemporary film, it's a deeply moving social drama, raw and gritty in style, shining with moral purpose as it delivers a scathing take-it-into-the-streets critique of feral capitalism and racism. [18 July 1997, p.D1]

Aims its big, bold mother-daughter conflicts straight at the heart by way of the tear ducts, and connects.

There's enchanting delicacy and irresistible quirkiness in Anthony Minghella's allegory of grief. And humane comedy, too, in this fable about a woman flattened by inconsolable loss, then rejoining the world. [24 May 1991]

The sad thing about Clint Eastwood's White Hunter, Black Heart is that it fails in every important respect, yet is in no way cheap or exploitative. [20 Sep 1990, p.81p]

A space shot worth taking.

Hoop Dreams is without peer among sports-oriented documentaries to the extent that it's about people before it's about athletic feats. It respects its subjects' complexity and tenacity while nailing the problematic, double-edged influence of sports in America. In fact, no film has ever combined sports and family values as powerfully as Hoop Dreams. There's simply nothing like it. [21 Oct 1994, p.47]

What Merchant, Ivory and Co. arrive at is a sort of handsomely illustrated Cliffs Notes version of the novel.

A witty yet fiery and, in the best sense, provocative play of ideas about freedom of expression.

Judd is pretty much on her own - an assignment she mostly can handle with aplomb.

In short, the film removes any possible shred of gloss or glamorization of the situation. It's gritty, honest and admirable. Sarandon is perfect as the combative mother. You can't take your eyes off her. And Nolte eventually is touching as the dogged father determined to find a cure in the Library of Congress. [15 Jan 1993, p.45]

There's something elegiac in Redford's spy who knows he's a dinosaur but still has a few moves left.

Superior and original filmmaking. You won't be able to take your eyes off it.

The General is a gravely beautiful film (in wide-screen black and white) by John Boorman about an Irish career criminal who was an antiauthoritarian folk hero, a warm family man to a menage a trois, and also a dangerous psychopath.

Its protagonist haven't enough emotional substance to carry them through the long, darkly lit introspective sequences.

The film collapses under the weight of the effort to shoehorn Shakespeare's story into a context that ultimately doesn't accommodate it.

"Pulp Fiction" wannabes don't get much slicker or edgier than Go.

Career Girls is a film that knows how wounding and complicated life can be, yet still believes in, and convincingly renders, the healing power of friendship. [15 Aug. 1997, p.D4]

Meretricious without being entertaining, it's an easy game -- and an easier film -- to sit out.

Lee's light hand with his timeless subjects deftly, affectingly, ruefully and hilariously covers all the bases. [19 Aug 1994, p.49]

A fatally insubstantial film.

Particularly because Savini obviously feels a responsibility to the original, it's impossible for this new film to unfold with any sense of discovery or surprise. It's almost all just at the level of dutiful replication. [19 Oct 1990, p.35]

The buzz was negative on So I Married an Axe Murderer, but the buzz was wrong. Mike Myers' new comedy isn't quite as fresh and bubbly and goofy as "Wayne's World," but it's hip, lively fun, with only a slight bit of sag. [30 July 1993, p.29]

The flat tire of summer movies.

At first glance, Running on Empty seems a humane, if rickety, left-wing tearjerker, with strong acting propping up a weak script. It takes a second glance to get at what's really interesting about the film - its subtext. [30 Sep 1988, p.33]

The Shipping News is good news, but not as good as it could have been.

Assayas and his engaged, responsive cast finally beat the odds, subtly and beautifully enabling the film to genuinely seem to be about a handful of friends approaching - not always easily or even gracefully but ultimately very touchingly - the September of their shared and individual lives. [13 Aug 1999, p.D4]

Neither the film nor the play has figured out where to go with Barry Champlain once it plants him at the center of his can-of-worms microcosm. We're never bored by his whiplash flailings, but on screen, as on stage, we can't help asking ourselves to what end they're being deployed. [13 Jan 1989, p.46]

The best thing about the film is the way it allows Richard Pryor to rise above the demeaning buffoon roles he's been playing for the last few years and finally play a character with dignity and style. [17 Nov 1989, p.89]

The genius - and there is a cockeyed genius permeating "The Brady Bunch" - is that it nails the entrapment and anxiety beneath the happy faces as unmistakably as the films of Douglas Sirk did the decade before. [17 Feb 1995, p.41]

There's nothing major here, certainly nothing on the order of my favorite among Allen's retro workouts of the past decade, ''Bullets Over Broadway.'' But it's entertaining all the same.

It's a spectacular ballet of death, lavishing upon us the highest body count of any action movie since "Total Recall," and its cynical panache marks a return to form for kickboxer Jean-Claude Van Damme, whose recent vehicles have sputtered. Not "Hard Target," though, which floors it from start to finish as it sends Van Damme after a vicious gang that rounds up homeless vets to serve as sacrificial victims for rich hunters in New Orleans. [20 Aug 1993, p.43]

Richly textured, beautifully acted.

Sabrina is a nice try that doesn't quite strike the romantic pay dirt it's after, but you won't walk away from it empty-handed. [15 Dec 1995, p.61]

Mindless glitz-o-ramas don't get any snazzier.

It's a powerful depth charge of a film about reinvented family values. In Denis's hands, this urgent, loving brother and sister act is lyrical, exhilarating, flecked with mystery. [24 Oct 1997, p.C6]

The script by Ian Abrams puts them through strictly formulaic moves, but it has flashes of wit and it's even literate. [10 Sept 1993, p.47]

Albert Finney's name on a cast list is a guarantee of pleasure, and there's much to savor besides in Suri Krishnamma's A Man of No Importance. [03 Feb 1995]

Miguel Arteta's Star Maps is an uneven first feature, but what's good in it is very good. It's got invigorating rawness to spare, making its low budget work in its favor. [22 Aug 1997, p.F5]

There's too much control in it and not enough danger.

What makes Love Affair fun isn't that its stars are offscreen lovers, but that onscreen they so obviously succeed at convincing you they're movie stars playing movie lovers, powering up the dream factory again, dishing out schmaltz like there's no tomorrow. [21 Oct 1994, p.50]

An example of a film that begins with a provocative idea and then runs itself into the ground with clumsy structuring.

The kind of film that could easily be undone by its own high-minded ambitions and dissolve in a pall of uplift. But it stays the course and gives the season two of its notable performances.

A perfect example of a small, well-made, and (in its central role) rivetingly acted film.

This one, a comic vacuum, is close to amateurish. [22 May 1992, p.32]

The Adventures of Ford Fairlane is a nonstop gross-out contest of absolutely no socially redeeming value at all, unless you happen to value laughter. Ford Fairlane is funny garbage. [11 Jul 1990, p.41]

There's no getting around the fact that the movie is pretty ponderous. The problem is that its writers and producers haven't really expanded or deepened the basic Conehead setup - they mostly drown it in more time and money than it ever had the first time around. [23 July 1993, p.42]

Something is missing in Bounce, the muted dynamic of which calls forth a perhaps inevitably muted reaction.

His (Green) new gross-out comedy is crude and stupid, but just as often rudely funny. It doesn't so much push the envelope as shred it.

I'm not sure that I really want to see "Scream 3,'" but Craven, Williamson, and the screamers certainly bring this one off by not only slapping all their cards on the table, but insisting we admire the way they play them.

Never mind that it doesn't always work or that the film's two halves never quite mesh. The Cable Guy essentially is a genie escaped from a bottle, except that the bottle is a TV screen. [14 June 1996, p.59]

Although expertly directed by Bill Duke, Deep Cover becomes the cinematic equivalent of a drive-by shooting, posing as community uplift. [15 Apr 1992, p.91]