Jay Carr

Whatever portion of the alienated teen angst championship Thora Birch left unclaimed after ''American Beauty,'' she nails down brilliantly in Ghost World.

Filled with fun, style, and ensemble give-and-take, the peppy Love and Other Catastrophes restores one's faith in sex, lies, and videotape. [11 Apr 1997, p.C7]

Melville's austere yet sensuous reinvention of the genre's macho honor and trenchcoated, fedora-wearing iconography, coolly projected by Delon's expressionless face, makes "Le Samourai" a pungent and pleasurable experience still. [02 May 1977, p.D7]

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

In the end, it's the snatches of music, mangled as it is, and the mechanics of staging it, in the absence of Leigh's usual raw, urgent psychic collisions, that keep Topsy-Turvy from seeming merely a gorgeous wax museum.

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

Hollywood filmmaking at its best, brimming over with feeling, texture, spirit, and several kinds of keenness that transmute experience into big pop myth.

Here's the third classic you'd better know if you're going to know anything about American gangster movies. This one is powered by Paul Muni's thinly disguised and daringly simian take on Al Capone. [01 Nov 1991, p.35]

Married to the Mob is a funny yard sale of a film about regeneration in a junked-up America. [19 Aug 1988]

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

The story line is not what carries this picture. Pomeranc carries it, with his gentleness, taciturnity and wise eyes. Whether throwing an easy match just to see what will happen if he loses, or looking infinitely sad and worldly as he contemplates the folly of a narrow-focus opponent, Pomeranc makes the linking of a moral intelligence to a chess intelligence the most exhilarating and touching sports combo at the movies this year. [11 Aug 1993, p.29]

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

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]

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]

The Little Mermaid is more than Disney Lite, as so many of the studio's animations of the last couple of decades have been. It offers a strong link to the classic Disney tradition while generating freshly hatched delights. And it puts Disney back in the animation game in a big way. [17 Nov 1989, p.85p]

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.

There's nothing paltry about its poultry.

A witless mess with more scriptwriters than laughs. [12 May 1989, p.46]

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.

Nobody makes films as sympathetic to struggling working-class types as Mike Leigh, and nobody makes them as uncondescendingly. Although uneven, Leigh's latest, Life Is Sweet, is a honey of a film, one of the few to feel good about in this dismal year. [22 Nov. 1991, p.35]

[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]

It's flawed, but it's also rich. And how many films make you feel that you and the filmmaker are following the course of a dream?

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]

A hugely entertaining adrenaline rush of a thriller that does a couple of simple things right. That's all it needs to do. First, it casts Harrison Ford in the title role of convicted wife-murderer Richard Kimble, ever scrambling forward, one step ahead of pursuing cops, while hunting the real killer. Second, it never stops. [6 Aug 1993, p.41]

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

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

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

As generic as its title, but two things enable it to land: the basic likability of Mark Wahlberg as the wannabe protagonist, and the contagious energies in the rock concert sequences.