Jay Carr

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.

Executed on a pretty broad level, but if characterization is slighted, the ensemble is so rich, with such depth, that every few minutes another juicy turn keeps coming our way to divert us.

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.

As narrative, the film doesn't quite work, but as a pungent ethnic scrapbook filled with eccentricity and deadpan humor, The Plot Against Harry is a treasure chest of quirkiness. [20 Sep 1989, p.82]

Sweetly macabre charmer.

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]

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]

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

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.

"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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

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]

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]

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.

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]

In style and story line, the film is daring in its simplicity.

Short, perhaps, on originality but long on savvy and panache, Dave is a feel-good film that's bound to have a lock on the popular vote. [07 May 1993, p.25]