Jay Carr

At times Mantegna's character seems little more than his dilemma, but Mamet's stylized dialogue crackles urgently and colorfully, each word landing with a weight you find only in good writing. The dislocation accelerates compellingly into ironic absurdity as Mamet lets his cop swing in the wind in this mordant parable of wrong things done for right reasons. There have been a lot of cop movies, but never one like Homicide. It has a way all its own of raising your consciousness by whacking you in the head. [18 Oct 1991, p.33]

Sensuous and rarefied, elevating its particulars into epiphanies, The Long Day Closes is as joyful as introversion gets. [9 July 1993, p.25]

The best film of 2001 was made in 1979. [10 Aug 2001, p.D1]

Music for the eyes. That's why it has become a treasured classic. That's why we'll see it again and again. [2002 re-release]

The phone scene, in which he's on the hot line to his Russian counterpart, is a classic of prevarication, a masterpiece of nothingspeak in the face of disaster. [28 Oct 1994, p.48]

This is an instant classic, primal and immediate in its depiction of the death of a parent, firmly anchored in the Disney style while extending its boundaries with arresting new perspectives and a tough-mindedness simply not possible to its most obvious ancestors, Bambi and The Jungle Book. [24 June 1994, p.47]

Wild Reeds is not only Andre Techine's best film in a decade, it's one of France's, too. [22 Sep 1995, p.57]

Watching it is a nonstop high.

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]

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]

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.

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

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

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

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]

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]

My only complaint about Naked Gun 2 1/2 is that it doesn't give you enough time to finish laughing at one gag before the next one comes along, cracking you up all over again. Naked Gun 2 1/2 is high-flying low comedy, 90 minutes of sublime nonsense that only the devoutly humorless could hate. [28 June 1991, p.69]

Bizarre, shadowy, enticingly eerie...more poetic, more tantalizingly original.

Not since the original ''Star Wars'' trilogy has film dipped into myth and emerged with the kind of weight and heft seen in Peter Jackson's first installment of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Farnsworth's embodiment of old American values, with their combination of delicacy, reserve, and stand-alone independence, is a one-of-a-kind treasure.

Microcosmos is a microspectacular. [08 Nov 1996, p.C6]

Catchy and unobtrusively assured, it's both hip and innocent, stylized and natural, charming its way through a conventional hey-kids-let's-have-a-party plot with bright comedy, great dancing, and on-top-of-it rap. It even manages to send a few messages about responsibility without being boring. In short, it's the best teen genre movie in ages. [23 Mar 1990, p.43]

It rates a resounding yes because it doesn't insult our emotional intelligence. [23 Nov 1983]

Intriguing, arresting, delightfully refusing to be pigeonholed.

Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July is a knockout, a huge angry howl of movie that uses a crippled Vietnam veteran's disability as metaphor for a country's paralysis. [5 Jan 1990, p.67]

Never has a film taken such relish in between-the-wars malice as Gosford Park.

Just when you thought gangster movies had peaked, here's Warren Beatty in Bugsy, a film so suave, outrageous, flamboyant, knowing and above all playful that you're liable to overlook the fact that it's more loaded with American resonances than any three pop culture courses you could sign up for. [20 Dec 1991, p.53]

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]

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

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

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

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

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

A sweet screenful of quirky chaos.

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

What makes Toy Story such a dazzling surprise is that while technological novelty is partly what it's about, it transcends technology. [22 Nov 1995, p.29]

Stillman has become a master at escalating the laughter by waiting an extra beat and then understating something devastatingly funny, as when someone looks Chris Eigeman's club manager, Des, in the eye and says, "I consider you a person of integrity - except, you know, in the matter of women."

It's a relief that when Fellini decided to sum up his career, he still had enough left to do it so wittily, jauntily and with such expansiveness of spirit. Lovely stuff, just lovely. [19 Feb 1993, p.30]

Vincent and Theo is one of the great Robert Altman films... It's Altman's most structurally conventional film, although it's filled with such trademarks as overlapping conversations. It's also his most personal and deeply felt. [16 Nov 1990, p.81]

Nobody ever placed brilliance in the service of silliness quite the way the Python gang did. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is stuffed with both.

This smart Richard III looks terrific, moves like the wind and rides the nerve of McKellen daring us not to enjoy its central monster's evil panache. [19 Jan 1995, p.57]

What makes A Streetcar Named Desire rewarding to watch today, especially on a big screen, is the same thing that made it so cherishable in the first place - Williams' heartbreaking lyricism, the titanic performances by Vivien Leigh's Blanche and Marlon Brando's Stanley, and Williams' most perfect realization of his ongoing central theme - the extermination of sensitivity and refinement by the brutes and carnivores of the world. [Director's Cut; 18 Feb 1994, p.37]

Jungle Fever is Spike Lee's best film yet. Although it's about a black man and a white woman launching an intimate relationship, it's anything but an interracial love story. Which is exactly the film's point. [7 June 1991, p.43]

Driving Miss Daisy, about the deepening relationship between a Jewish matron in Atlanta and her black chauffeur, is a luminous joy of a film, heartbreakingly delicate, effortlessly able through indirection to invoke the civil rights era without ever once slipping into portentous pronouncements. [12 Jan. 1990, p.35]

Yet, paradoxically, the fact that almost every line becomes a double entendre confirms the fact that the movie is one of Allen's best. Although Allen, like the character he's playing, may self-destruct, the movie emerges triumphant. It holds us from start to finish - a rueful, ironic, wrenchingly funny study of yet another set of mixed Manhattan doubles dedicated to the belief that there's no marriage or relationship so bad that it can't be traded for - or transformed into - something worse. [18 Sept 1992, p.51]

You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of works in any given year to which one is moved to apply the word ''masterpiece.'' Raul Ruiz's Time Regained is one of them.

It's a sleeper - the kind of fresh, dark, edgy, formula-shunning surprise that snaps you out of the usual Hollywood-induced torpor and nudges you back into believing in movies. [19 Apr 1991, p.44]

Spartacus stands up handsomely. At times it's even stirring, as in Woody Strode's performance as the African gladiator who, in sparing Spartacus' life, opens his eyes. Spartacus is one of Hollywood's great comic strips. [3 May 1991, p.45]

From the first bracing hint of self-mockery in its title to its smoky, after-hours resolution, it's a grabber and a delight, constantly surpassing our expectations. [13 Oct 1989, p.35]

A grand, dark, grave, severe piece of first-rate cinema.

All sword and sorcery movies are parodies, but Sam Raimi's "Army of Darkness" is the best intentional parody that hardware-heavy genre has ever seen, piling conventions from other genres on top of it until the screen seems a multilayered deli delight...Entertaining and ingeniously resourceful, it's a virtuosic comic-strip movie. [19 Feb 1993, p.30]

Simple, but loaded. It celebrates the humanity and humanism at the heart of Iran's remarkable flow of films, but it's also more of a rebuke to materialistic values than any ideologue could ever hope to be.

An invigoratingly mordant comedy that proves that Alexander Payne's rambunctious debut, "Citizen Ruth," was no fluke.

Generous in its emotions as well as its visuals, it makes its healing energies real because it takes the trouble to make its characters' pain believable. It's a big, bold, slightly old-fashioned film carried by its heartfelt conviction, by Barbra Streisand's painstaking direction and self-effacing acting, and by Nick Nolte. [25 Dec 1991, p.47]

First and foremost, Good Will Hunting is a film riding young, exuberant energies.

Roberts and Erin Brockovich have Oscar contender written all over them.

A civilized delight.

In short, A Christmas Story isn't just about Christmas; it's about childhood and it recaptures a time and place with love and wonder. It seems an instant classic, a film that will give pleasure to people not only this Christmas, but for many Christmases to come. [19 Nov 1983, p.1]

It's all we ask of a film but almost never get, as it first makes us squirm, then makes us cheer.

Badlands is one of the great banality-of-evil films. [29 May 1998, p.C9]

Gas Food Lodging is a film about nourishment on a financial and emotional shoestring. It's a delight. [19 Sept 1992, p.29]

Fresh is urgent, impressively thought out, tightly coiled. Written, directed and acted with invigorating subtlety, there's nothing stale about Fresh. It's an original, and it's terrific. [31 Aug 1994, p.27]

Not only exhilarating and cathartic. It's too funny to be ignored.

With Carrey hitting a career peak, this Grinch doesn't steal Christmas; it restores the season by helping energize us enough to make it through the whole thing.

It isn't often that lives of quiet desperation are served up with such pearly restraint.

The story is spun forth ravishingly, tenderly, and urgently, with a captivating mix of beauty, spare sophistication, and profound humanity.

It's terse, atmospheric, fatalistic, with vertiginous camera angles and edits offsetting its gray documentary flatness.

On screen as on the page, The Age of Innocence is a stunning period piece filled with depth charges. [17 Sept 1993, p.49]

A feast of a film that goes on feeding you long after you've left the theater. [25 Dec 1995, p.83]

"In Cold Blood," "Badlands," "The Executioner's Song," and now, joining those grisly milestones on the heartland hit list, and every bit their equal, is Boys Don't Cry.

A Bronx Tale is a joy, a film that comes unerringly from someone's heart and experience, and not from a power lunch of agents with clients to be packaged. [1 Oct 1993, p. 49]

The women here aren't afraid to get extreme about love, but in the end, you sense that they are too sound to destroy themselves over the worthless man they have allowed to personify it. That's what lifts Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown from the amusing to the sublime. [23 Dec 1988, p.23]

Naked is one of the most scorchingly compelling films in years, Mike Leigh's masterpiece, an unflinching vision of civilization in retreat, life as apocalypse. [4 Mar. 1994, p.51]

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

Terrific French film about that most universal of subjects - work.

Slly, sublime, buoyant mischief that is virtually without parallel in 20th-century art, much less 20th-century film.

Brilliant and impassioned as Day Lewis' performance is, it isn't the only reason this film is so exhilarating. Director Jim Sheridan, who clearly has assimilated Brown's two memoirs (the film takes its name from the first), draws Christy's impoverished Irish family with idiomatic rightness and a satisfying and rare (to American films at least) emotional fullness. [15 Sept, 1989, p.41]

It's one of the great sister movies and one of the great performance movies. [26 Jan 1996]

Casualties of War is just as successful as "Platoon" was in making us feel Vietnam's moment-by-moment tension, but its central event gives it more resonance. [18 Aug 1989, p.43]

The most remarkable accomplishment of Heavenly Creatures is its unfailing ability to compel us to identify with its two young Salomes. They're right to sense that the adult world around them means to snuff them out, and you can understand and even sympathize with their desperate need to muster a preemptive strike so they can stay together. Heavenly Creatures is potent, daring, invigorating filmmaking. [23 Nov 1994, p.29]

One of the films in the running as Charlie Chaplin's funniest and most adroitly balanced between comedy and pathos. [7 Sept 1990]

The greatest B-movie ever made. [Director's Cut; 18 Sept 1998, p.D5]

Quiet, powerful, contemplative, respectful of stillness, Eureka is the first film this year in which there is obvious greatness.

The sly and subtle Minus Man is a wicked little sidewinder of a black comedy.

Quiz Show, Robert Redford's strongest movie yet, has contender written all over it. Swinging from the heels, it connects solidly, powerfully and probingly with the event that triggered America's loss of postwar innocence and erosion of public trust. [16 Sept 1994, p.59]

With its beautifully crafted starburst of colors and themes spanning its requisite Victorian gravity, A Little Princess is a beguiling little supernova of a movie I can't imagine anyone not loving. [19 May 1995, p.64]

Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise isn't just one of France's great love stories - it's one of film's. [23 Feb 1992, p.B35]

In a crisply restored print, it's as joyous as ever. We loved them - yeah, yeah, yeah. Now we can love them all over again.

But then Being John Malkovich is a brilliant juggling act, too, brilliantly brought off.

Few, if any, films this year will approach, let alone equal, Autumn Tale in its subtle sparkle.

[The novel's] themes have never not been fresh and they gleam here under the sympathetic and enlivening touch of Armstrong and her cast, who move through the events with sunny assurance and complete immersion in character. [21 Dec 1994]

A heady flow of brilliant stupidity.

He's (Dafoe) the stuff bad dreams are made of. He's also the best movie vampire since Schreck's original. He deserves a bloody Oscar.

The film is rightfully carried by Nico and Dani and under Gay's artful helmsmanship it's carried with remarkable sympathy and believability.

The most disorienting and trippiest data-retrieval caper in years.

The kind of richly layered film that Hollywood seldom attempts, much less brings off. But it's more than brought off here in grand, solid style and beautifully crafted detail.

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

Red Rock West is one of the ongoing reasons noir is a genre that just won't say die. It's one of the most deviously entertaining detours since, well, Detour. [20 May 1994, p.53]