Jay Carr

What Happened Was nails contemporary isolation as few films do. It's filled with acute insights and observations of the wary yet hopeful circling that people do in conversation on a first date. It's a gem of a chamber play. [17 Sep 1994, p.37]

In short, it's a gripping film with some surprises that emerge from around the edges. [24 Nov 1993, p.39]

A long, warm, satisfying farewell encounter.

Although idiotic, The Evil Dead at least is propelled by energy and enthusiasm. It's scarier than many a more pretentious effort, and not everything in it is borrowed. [8 Oct 1983, p.Arts1]

This one is a tensely clammy screw-tightener about an ex-con (Gene Nelson) pressured to become part of a bank heist. No cop ever chewed a toothpick better than Sterling Hayden does here. [07 Jan 1996, p.C31]

There are a few tonal glitches, but Newell's hand is remarkably sure, the actors are winning, and Into the West is a treat. [17 Sep 1993, p.54]

For a while, Light Sleeper hangs together promisingly. But when Dafoe's character meets old flame Dana Delaney, the plot spirals into preposterousness involving a sinister Eurotrash client, and the film also gets away from Schrader, who isn't a deft enough director to conceal or minimize the flaws in his script. [15 Sep 1992, p.71]

One of the year's most winning performances, Logue's Dex will grow on you as he stumbles toward emotional fullness.

Rarely has a movie that looked so good on paper fallen so flat as the aptly named Charlotte Gray. It's not a bad movie. Bad movies have more flavor.

This is a sizzling, invigorating Hamlet.

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

Delightful and original, the film conjures up a corner of Paris distinct and specific, yet fairy-tale fanciful.

Has everything you want in a supernatural thriller except thrills.

I know it's not "Citizen Kane," but it pushes my buttons. [25 March 1994, p.47]

A small film and, ultimately, a satisfying one.

Agreeable eye candy and ear candy, but it's too slight to reach as deep as it thinks it wants to reach.

A clever, affectionate, and entertaining holiday snack for sci-fi fans. Falling somewhere between slick and cheesy.

The Scent of Green Papaya is an astonishingly rich evocation of maternal energies and gestures, expressed in lovingly lingered-on images. [25 Feb 1994, p.47]

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]

Stylish, sad, opulent, brilliant, and clear-eyed, Wilde does justice to its complex subject. It should stand as the definitive biofilm for years to come. [05 Jun 1998, p.D6]

A terrific little uppercut of a boxing movie and close to a perfect one.

Unstrung Heroes, with its small, detailed brush strokes and its eye for specifics, marks Diane Keaton's directorial breakthrough. [15 Sep 1995]

In short, Roger & Me is a breath of new life blowing through the Rust Belt. So depressed has this country's underclass been that any sign of life from it makes you want to cheer, and the funny and furious Roger & Me makes you want to cheer a lot. [12 Jan 1990, p.38P]

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]

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]

Beneath its relentlessly decorous surface, "There's Always Tomorrow" is an Eisenhower-era horror story, starring America as a void with sharp teeth. [25 May 1990, p.50p]

The screen Grease seemed at the time a big, overblown version of the sassy, gritty stage musical. Now the differences seem less important. What the two versions share are sizzle and a refusal to ignore the sexual energy of an exuberant cast. Grease seems kickier now than it did 20 years ago. [27 Mar 1998, p.D6]

The Krays is one of the artiest, eeriest gangster movies ever made. [15 Sep 1990, p.14p]

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]

An abundance of style and an almost total lack of substance make Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together a visually arresting but ultimately unrewarding excursion. [31 Oct 1997]

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.

Sitting through Lethal Weapon 2 is like dating a jackhammer. It's a slick, cynical, high-speed assembly line of car chases, jokes, sex, explosions and blood. [41 Jul 1989, p.41]

Billy Crystal's wit and sweet energies carry it past what could have been a fatal degree of mushiness. Although there's rather too much redemption for one cattle drive, and the film's attitude toward women is at best opaque, Crystal brings warmth and ease to his sharp timing and edgy comic style as he and his pals entertainingly usher us into their brotherhood of schlepdom. [7 June 1991, p.53]

[Verhoeven's] cold, slick, funny, high-powered movie is informed by a humanism this genre almost always abandons in its chase after vigilante splat. [17 Jul 1987]

Although Truth or Dare makes you wish it had dug more deeply, it nevertheless convinces you that there's more to Madonna than the stage personas she sheds like skins. It's as much an exercise in packaging as in documentary, but at least the package isn't empty. [17 May 1991, p.29]

Perhaps a little more back story would have given Levitch some dimension and given us a bit more incentive to commiserate with him. As it is, a little Levitch goes a long way. [20 Nov 1998, p.C4]

It'll satisfy genre fans and Lee fans and win new adherents to the Asian-style action film, with its dazzling moves that make conventional Hollywood movies look like cement mixers in low gear. [7 May 1993, p.25]

It never really chills you, but then it never insults you, either, and it's more affecting than you expect any film based on a Stephen King novel to be. [22 Oct 1983]

Franco Zeffirelli's reputation as a popularizer of Shakespeare stems from this gusty swirl of a 1968 production built around - and aimed at - teens. The uncomprehending looks on the faces of Leonard Whiting's Romeo and Olivia Hussey's Juliet only increase the film's demographic pull, as poetry is replaced with prettiness. [18 Jan 1991, p.32p]

I Went Down is an offbeat Irish gangster movie that overcomes its meandering nature with engaging performances, an avoidance of formula, and, above all, its characters' way of making us take everything personally - as they certainly do. [1 July 1998, p.F4]

It's easily the best of the movies I've seen by the various "Saturday Night Live" alumni, and part of the reason it's funny and satisfying is that it doesn't strain. [09 Jun 1983]

When a tone is sustained as confidently and with as many delicious flourishes as A Shock to the System manages, and the screen is filled with characterful performances, it's a sign the director is doing something right. [23 Mar 1990, p.46p]

It's the kind of movie you can settle into, secure in the expectation that you can steal from it more than a little vintage Allen fun.

It's one of the few films that persuades you that it went out to meet the war and bring it to us with verisimilitude.

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.

It's lively, edgy, full of zigs and zags, juicy performances, and offbeat fun.

A gorgeous autumnal period piece that catches a vanishing proprietary class on the eve of its extinction in Ireland in 1920.

Gremlins 2 is one of the few sequels that improves on the original. [15 Jun 1990, p.33p]

Soderbergh's sleekly malignant Underneath is a nasty little winner. [28 April 1995, p.81]

A lively and affectionate cross between an infomercial and a genuflection.

A clever and satisfyingly abundant entertainment.

Despite a deceptively aimless surface that seems to take off from the initial character's musings on roads not taken, Slacker is more than a gallery of alienated post-collegiates spinning their wheels waiting for something to happen. [4 Oct. 1991, p.47]

Von Trier's visuals are stunning enough to almost conceal the hollowness of his elliptical story. [03 Jul 1992, p.42]

It's not a perfect film. In fact, it's in many ways a messy film. But if it's disjointed, so are its characters' lives. And they're put onscreen with a veracity and an emotional authenticity that draw you into their tight little barnyard world. [17 Jul 1992, p.31]

Guncrazy, a film more about limits than about bullets, is a pretty compelling little pistols 'n' potency outing, and Barrymore's sprung teen is what makes it almost mandatory viewing. In her chopped blond hair, creamy skin, strong chin and perfectly curved jawline, she's Lolita with the safety catch off. [05 Feb 1993, p.30]

The film's triumph - and it is a triumph - in the end rests on the ability of Hrebejk and his actors to convince us that they never stop being normal people.

A League of Their Own may not boost its material into the level of pop myth as, say, last year's great female buddy movie, "Thelma & Louise," did. It's a bit too concerned with being likable to make that kind of bold leap. But if A League of Their Own doesn't knock the ball out of the park, it's a clean hit, with extra bases written all over it. [1 July 1992, p.41]

Sometimes gets bogged down in its own wordiness.

A climactic explosion is too obviously a rigged gunpowder charge, and it becomes a metaphor for the film's mistake of diminishing the frantic motion that kept things fizzy and fun.

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]

In all respects, from choice of material to fullness of execution on every level, The War Zone is an extraordinary piece of work.

Such an utter piece of fluff so conceptually barren it might as well be a music video.

Miller is going to take some heat for making this new film inhabit a cruel world. But better that than sugarcoating the story. He's found a way to recycle a popular film - choppily perhaps, episodically perhaps, but provocatively. [25 Nov 1998, p.C1]

Until it goes off course, Limbo not only is up to Sayles's high standard, but extends it. [04 Jun 1999, p.C4]

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels essentially remains a duet of exquisitely turned gestures exchanged by Martin and Caine. It isn't killer comedy. Sometimes its leisurely pace veers dangerously close to slackness. But it's as close as Hollywood comedy comes to chamber music. [14 Dec 1988, p.77]

Richly compelling.

Too quick to uncritically and unthinkingly accept its subject's rollickingly self-mythologizing take on himself.

In Bopha! the usual apartheid-struggle elements never thin out into abstractions. They're elemental, encapsulating a country's tragedy resonantly and powerfully in a single family's. [24 Sept 1993, p.51]

Writing ignites miracles in Henry Fool, and Hartley's exquisite control over his compositions and pacing makes the outrages, biological and otherwise, funnier than you might believe. [01 Jul 1998]

The new film is simply more confident, more idiosyncratically dark, weird, gnarled and twisted than "Batman." And because it's more obviously permeated by Burton's style and sensibility, it's also more fun. [19 June 1992, p.47]

Watson's character grows in importance until she eclipses the recessive Luzhin.

Isn't going to be a contender

Slickly directed by Joel Schumacher, who sees that each and every button in this unabashedly manipulative film is pushed hard, Falling Down could have been deeply disturbing if it weren't so cartoony, so determined to glibly escape the moral consequences of the vicarious white-rampage fantasies to which it caters. [26 Feb 1993, p.25]

"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]

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

Angst-ridden, yet graceful, stylish, and optimistic allegory about swerving off one road and finding your way back via another.

The film will resonate with today's alienated workers, whose every brain cell and nerve ending hates the soul-crushing jobs they're told they should be grateful to have.

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]

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]

The story is told handsomely and affectingly with images, facial expressions and body language. [16 Oct 1992]

More self-mockery is needed, less self-regard. [07 Apr 1995, p.90]

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]

Likable, go-with-the-flow comedy.

Although his (Jarmusch) films have moments of sly obliqueness, they leave us feeling stranded in underdevelopment. This is the case with Night on Earth, which is launched on a promising conceit - nocturnal taxi rides in five cities around the world during the same time slot. By the time the film ends, we can't help wondering just who has been taken for a ride. [15 May 1992, p.85]

The skies are thick with whizzing bullets and strings being pulled by Shane Black's crude script and Richard Donner's cement-mixer direction. Predictably, the chicks-and-ammo stuff is punctuated by TV cop show repartee. [6 Mar 1987, p.36]

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

Jude is a modernized version of Hardy, but a handsome, fluid and red-blooded one that has no difficulty finding correlatives to the prejudice and hatred of wit and spirit against which Hardy, in his gimlet-eyed way, so passionately attacked. [25 Oct 1996]

It epitomizes the kind of high-profile bloodshed we now expect to herald the hazy, lazy, blockbuster-fixated days of summer.

Cronenberg hasn't so much filmed Naked Lunch as tamed it, turned it into entertainment, with oozy rubber bugs, big and little, that look left over from David Lynch's movie of "Dune," or the intergalactic dive from "Star Wars." [10 Jan 1992]

It turns the nerve-fraying Cuban missile crisis into a big pop myth with the grip of a vise.

Lisa Krueger's "Manny & Lo" is the most original and unexpected family-values film of the year. [09 Aug 1996, p.C8]

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]

Needs less down-to-earth flavor and more unearthly force.

It's not quite as jolting as the high-impact original, but it's got enough explosiveness to blow away the other sequels in this summer's parade of high-body-count blockbusters. [4 July 1990, p.29]

If Blaze is a bit mushy, it's also more than skin deep. It's the kind of film whose shortcomings are easy to minimize. It's a muted last hurrah for a departed and worthy brand of populism, but a hurrah all the same. [13 Dec 1989, p.66P]

Man Bites Dog brings new meaning to the term guilty pleasure...You will by now be thinking that "Man Bites Dog" isn't easy to take. It isn't. But the viciousness of its violence is justified by the fact that it isn't exploitative. It's there to indict exploitation and complicity...It's "Sweeney Todd" filtered through "Spinal Tap," shock theater designed to remind us that we conveniently downplay our central role in the media's preoccupation with violence. [30 Apr 1993, p.50]

Isn't much more than ''Baise-Moi'' in business suits as they deconstruct sisterhood with an expense account, but their duets sizzle.

A bit of a cop-out, wrapping in wistful sentimentality a failure to acknowledge a connection that is more than epidermal.