Jay Carr

You'll care what happens in this film with more than enough freshness and originality to avoid succumbing to girls-on-the-run cliches.

Cross Fame and Spinal Tap, color it Irish, and you've got The Commitments, the summer's most irresistible movie. [30 Aug 1991, p.79]

Mostly it's Paredes' imperious - then surprisingly generous - high-handedness that carries High Heels. [20 Dec 1991]

A tender genuflection to the women's energies that keep that spinning world from keeling over.

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]

From its opening evolution sequence of squiggly things in the water through its references to the great circle of life, The Land Before Time embraces a larger perspective than merely that of the adventure story. It's an affecting work, and a work of quality. [18 Nov 1988, p.29]

Many spy capers lose their intended irony and wry black humor, but The Tailor of Panama stays stylishly on target in ways that would put a heat-seeking missile to shame.

Staying Alive, the sequel to John Travolta's "Saturday Night Fever," plays like wet cement. [16 Jul 1983]

But, fittingly, it's the kids who carry this outing. They're led by Sean Astin, who's rightly more of a dreamer than the others. Jeff B. Cohen engagingly handles the most cliched role, the fat kid who keeps stuffing his face. And I couldn't help wondering if Ke Huy Quan, who played Indy's sidekick in the Temple of Doom, knows that not all movies are made in caves. In any case, you can relax. The Goonies is entertaining despite its calculated flavor. [7 Jun 1985, p.61]

The simplicity of Like Water for Chocolate - a Mexican expression for the boiling point - is that of a sophisticated hand paring away all excess until what's left is primal, elemental. In Esquivel's and Arau's fabulist hands, it's the hand that tends the cookfire that rules the world. [19 Mar 1993, p.50]

Spacey is diamond-brilliant in a role that plays as if custom-made for him.

Sweet, but slight. [20 Oct 1995, p.52]

It's a meditation on life and death, but it's less somber and more light-handed, subtle, and mischievously funny.

It's funky and funny, not just sleek, riding witty repartee that makes it seem an extension of the fizzy, romantic comedies of the '30s (as well as the Harlem Renaissance, invoked by its poetry club scenes). [14 Mar 1977, p.C1]

It frankly doesn't match the franchise-renewing freshness of The Little Mermaid and the mythic core and emotional depth of Beauty and the Beast, but it has something neither of those films had - Robin Williams' scatty brilliance as the jolly Blue Genie, who carries Aladdin past some generic ordinariness that goes with the new feature's slick, zappy, computer-generated up-to-dateness and topicality. [25 Nov 1992, p.35]

It's intelligently crafted, above average for this presumably dying genre, and if you can get past a couple of potential credibility problems, you'll find it absorbing. [23 Mar 1990, p.45]

At times, there's no escaping the schematic nature of what's unfolding - such as the buddies' horseplay, and an ending that seems tacked on. But Savoca makes it all happen with a charm that overcomes the lapses in the script. [04 Oct 1991, p.44]

It's an instant classic, in every way the equal of the great Disney animations of the past. [22 Nov 1991, p.33]

It's a terrific musical biofilm filled with drive, solid characterizations and - biggest surprise of all - musical performances that jump off the screen. [22 Apr 1994, p.33]

Sonatine is less stylish and affecting than Fireworks. Its deadpan satire becomes indistinguishable from numbing slack as the waiting game is played out.[17 Apr 1998, p.F7]

The kind of film you've got to admire simply for the way it squares its shoulders and plunges into a message of unfashionable idealism.

Has everything you want in a supernatural thriller except thrills.

As baseball movies go, Little Big League is a bunt single. Metaphorically speaking, it knows how to put the bat on the ball, though it's too lightweight to knock anything out of the park. [29 Jun 1994, p.83]

There's not only physics between them, but chemistry. I.Q. may be slight, but it's a civilized delight. [23 Dec 1994, p.45]

Hot Shots! revels in absurdity. At times it's as surreal as the Marx Brothers. [21 May 1993, p.26]

When Branagh's camera soars above the final celebratory dancing and choral anthem, you'll soar, too. [21 May 1993, p.23]

It goes for broke on high-roller, high-energy scenes, and wins big. [11 Jun 1993, p.41]

The screenplay, with its relentlessly schematic characters saying relentlessly schematic things, is so moronic that it makes you long for a documentary on the real Cape League.

Dogged allegiance to blandness.

The film musical is at the moment an even more devitalized art form than the Broadway musical. But Moulin Rouge doesn't revive it. It only rearranges the bones.

We're in a golden age of comedy, and one of the reasons is Margaret Cho.

It's mostly just buddies-bonding-over-bullets stuff. [29 Jan 1993, p.24]

It's slick, sleek, and stylish, and if it doesn't quite redefine cool, it certainly offers a snazzy update.

It's good cornball mainstream sci-fi, as close to brand-name reliability as this genre gets. [18 Nov. 1994, p.47]

Jungle 2 Jungle is surprisingly bearable. [07 Mar 1997, p.D5]

There was little mirth or innocence in the world that Wharton was able to write her way out of (she was much happier living in Paris), and Davies and his leading lady lift the silks to reveal it as the minefield it was.

Stephen Frears' Hero is a slyly entertaining reinvention of the old newspaper comedy - Frank Capra's Meet John Doe, William Wellman's Nothing Sacred, Howard Hawks' The Front Page - on the altar of TV. In an image-dominated age, what does the concept of heroism mean? Not much, once TV gets hold of it, Hero says. But it's peachy, not preachy, celebrating energy, resourcefulness and cheerful amorality. [02 Oct 1992, p.45]

First Knight, despite its unfortunate title, is not a stupid film, just a mostly flat and talky one. It's gorgeously crafted and filled with goodwill, but it's more admirable than genuinely compelling or moving, much less ablaze with conviction. It's got the trappings, but not the inner fire. [07 Jul 1995, p.27]

If The Mighty Quinn is slight, it's also very easy to take. And its soundtrack is a treat. [17 Feb 1989, p.90]

Last Action Hero is a spectacularly uneven movie. Its action is hectic, but scattershot and mostly pretty empty. On the other hand, it is entertaining in surprising ways. [18 Jun 1993, p.41]

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]

The Big Lebowski isn't quite up to the level of the Coen brothers' best films - "Miller's Crossing," "Fargo" and "Barton Fink." But second-level Coen brothers can be funnier than first-level almost everybody else. [6 March 1998, p.D5]

You expect virtuosic technique from Spielberg, and it's there, in spades. What you don't expect is heartfelt romanticism. But that's there, too... Always is a terrific-looking throwback to those large-scale '40s cinematic stews of romantic longing. [22 Dec. 1989, p.43]

The season's brightest piece of counterprogramming.

Neither as rollicking nor as wild as one had hoped, but Tyler's tongue-in-cheek noir goddess transcends cliche and the screenplay's other shortcomings terrifically.

Is a chamber romance, in that there's nothing grand or sweeping about it, but it's got all the style it needs to go with those glorious Tuscan settings.

Give it a chance and you'll probably share the cast's collective impulse to dive in and embrace it.

Light on its feet and reveling in its deviousness, it stays one step ahead of us .

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]

The Pillow Book is Peter Greenaway's most stunning and accessible film since "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover." Dense, gorgeous and inexorable - once you give yourself over to its logic - it's a boldly erotic explosion of Asian chic, taken to places no film has gone before. [20 Jun 1997]

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]

The Joy Luck Club is "Terms of Endearment" in quadruplicate, aimed at the heart and right on target. [24 Sept 1993, p.47]

The film works because Raimi's motor-rhythmed pop sensibility was ready to take off in this movie, and does, in a series of wonderfully hyperkinetic comic-strip lurches. [24 Aug. 1990, p.34]

Staggeringly preposterous, yet not without a certain entertainment value. Except for the glasnost angle, there's nothing original about The Package, yet there's something amusing in its reminder of how the political assassination genre has come full circle since "The Manchurian Candidate."

Captures the ensemble quality it was after and the provisional look and feel are perfect stylistic analogues to the lives - the male lives, anyway - that it's portraying.

A sweet screenful of quirky chaos.

Never lets down, even if depth of character always takes second place to depth charges.

Doesn't so much strike a lot of sour notes as fail to strike the right ones.

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]

The sheer intelligence and independence of spirit in Driver's busy eyes almost carry The Governess past its structural limitations. [07 Aug 1998]

Stark, haunting, epic, and mournful, The Claim is a mountain of a film.

It brings an enlivening wit to a comedy of culture collision.

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]

Glory is the long-needed antidote to Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. With a grave clarity that echoes Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Boston Common monument and Robert Lowell's angry poem, For the Union Dead, Glory not only does justice to its deserving subject, but brings it into the popular consciousness with a distinction that compels respect. [12 Jan 1990, p.36p]