Jay Carr

Until Exotica gets away from Egoyan at the end, it's his strongest bid yet to integrate strong feelings and sleek visuals. [03 Mar 1995, p.33]

There's no Passion in this psychological drama.

Presumed Innocent is interesting to the extent that it goes beyond the usual whodunit and courtroom drama formulas and shows how nobody really has clean hands. [27 July 1990, p.29P]

Not only reminds us that there's a little larceny in all of us, it reminds us how much fun it can be to commune with our inner thieves.

Has more ambition than the usual serial killer film, but curiously less urgency.

It's not afraid to play cornball when it isn't playing baseball, but The Rookie gets away with it.

Made of a serene dynamite that's all but unknown to American film audiences.

The film makes more apparent than ever that Howard is quite underrated as a filmmaker, possibly because he's been hidden in full view in the mainstream for so long.

While heartfelt and beautifully crafted, Bringing Out the Dead is too freighted with its protagonist's failed savior complex and is surprisingly lacking in primal impact.

Perhaps not the most uproarious of Veber's farces, but entertaining and emotionally satisfying all the same.

It's got sharp wit and a wise heart, and as good as it was onstage, it's even better as a movie. [22 Dec 1993, p.33]

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]

With keen-edged direction by Barbet Schroeder and a Richard Price screenplay loaded with venomous savvy, Kiss of Death is the most high-powered and brutal New York gangster movie since "GoodFellas." [21 Apr 1995, p.41]

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

Wacky enough and gadget-driven enough to appeal to bored kids looking for fresh energies.

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

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]

Just as Anspaugh and Pizzo pushed all the obvious buttons with their high school basketballers in "Hoosiers," so they turn Rudy into the "Rocky" of South Bend. It may be that Rudy's crowning piece of perseverance consisted of his dogging Anspaugh and Pizzo to film his story. It must be a comfort to Hoosiers Larry Bird and Don Mattingly to know that when the time comes for their biofilms, Anspaugh and Pizzo are in the phone book. [13 Oct 1993, p.75]

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]

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

Mad Dog and Glory is the funniest and most original studio comedy since "White Men Can't Jump." What makes it fun is its ability to find new ways to do old things. [5 Mar 1993, p.61]

Goes soft in the end, but not ruinously so. Meanwhile, its loose cannons bounce off one another deliciously.

As each scientist chronicles his or her story, one is impressed by the place that unswerving motivation and determination has assumed in the work.

Without Limits gives us the achievement, gives us Prefontaine'sflaws alongside the considerable appeal, makes us feel his loss. It's miles beyond the previous biofilm about him, Prefontaine. It works because it makes running a subset of being maniacal - and nothing works better in a movie. [13 Sep 1998, p.N25]

In its dark, relentless, devastatingly ironic way, The Pledge is an exhilarating movie, partly because it isn't afraid to be genuinely challenging.

Nobody's going to think of The Score as trail-blazing, but there's nothing small-time about its dramatic and acting payoff.

As luminous as the star presence at its center. It's at once a touching teacher movie and an even more touching love story.

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