Jay Carr

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Boston Globe
For 1,227 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 64% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 34% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.7 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Jay Carr's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Husbands and Wives
Lowest review score: 0 Beaches
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 845 out of 1227
  2. Mixed: 223 out of 1227
  3. Negative: 159 out of 1227
1227 movie reviews
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per page
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    A lively and affectionate cross between an infomercial and a genuflection.
    • Boston Globe
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    O Brother, Where Art Thou?
    A clever and satisfyingly abundant entertainment.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Slacker
    Despite a deceptively aimless surface that seems to take off from the initial character's musings on roads not taken, Slacker is more than a gallery of alienated post-collegiates spinning their wheels waiting for something to happen. [4 Oct. 1991, p.47]
    • Boston Globe
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Carr
    Europa
    Von Trier's visuals are stunning enough to almost conceal the hollowness of his elliptical story. [03 Jul 1992, p.42]
    • Boston Globe
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Falling from Grace
    It's not a perfect film. In fact, it's in many ways a messy film. But if it's disjointed, so are its characters' lives. And they're put onscreen with a veracity and an emotional authenticity that draw you into their tight little barnyard world. [17 Jul 1992, p.31]
    • Boston Globe
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Guncrazy
    Guncrazy, a film more about limits than about bullets, is a pretty compelling little pistols 'n' potency outing, and Barrymore's sprung teen is what makes it almost mandatory viewing. In her chopped blond hair, creamy skin, strong chin and perfectly curved jawline, she's Lolita with the safety catch off. [05 Feb 1993, p.30]
    • Boston Globe
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    Divided We Fall
    The film's triumph - and it is a triumph - in the end rests on the ability of Hrebejk and his actors to convince us that they never stop being normal people.
    • Boston Globe
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    A League of Their Own
    A League of Their Own may not boost its material into the level of pop myth as, say, last year's great female buddy movie, "Thelma & Louise," did. It's a bit too concerned with being likable to make that kind of bold leap. But if A League of Their Own doesn't knock the ball out of the park, it's a clean hit, with extra bases written all over it. [1 July 1992, p.41]
    • Boston Globe
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Intimacy
    Sometimes gets bogged down in its own wordiness.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Carr
    Adorenarin doraibu
    A climactic explosion is too obviously a rigged gunpowder charge, and it becomes a metaphor for the film's mistake of diminishing the frantic motion that kept things fizzy and fun.
    • Boston Globe
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    A Dry White Season
    Here's a good, honorable, but not great anti-apartheid movie, the first directed by a black woman. A Dry White Season unravels when it opts for a wrap-up-the-loose-ends thriller finish, but there's no faulting the level of acting or the level of commitment in it. [17 Sept 1989, p.B4]
    • Boston Globe
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    The War Zone
    In all respects, from choice of material to fullness of execution on every level, The War Zone is an extraordinary piece of work.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 38 Jay Carr
    Coyote Ugly
    Such an utter piece of fluff so conceptually barren it might as well be a music video.
    • Boston Globe
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Babe: Pig in the City
    Miller is going to take some heat for making this new film inhabit a cruel world. But better that than sugarcoating the story. He's found a way to recycle a popular film - choppily perhaps, episodically perhaps, but provocatively. [25 Nov 1998, p.C1]
    • Boston Globe
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Limbo
    Until it goes off course, Limbo not only is up to Sayles's high standard, but extends it. [04 Jun 1999, p.C4]
    • Boston Globe
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
    Dirty Rotten Scoundrels essentially remains a duet of exquisitely turned gestures exchanged by Martin and Caine. It isn't killer comedy. Sometimes its leisurely pace veers dangerously close to slackness. But it's as close as Hollywood comedy comes to chamber music. [14 Dec 1988, p.77]
    • Boston Globe
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    Alice et Martin
    Richly compelling.
    • Boston Globe
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Chopper
    Too quick to uncritically and unthinkingly accept its subject's rollickingly self-mythologizing take on himself.
    • Boston Globe
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    Bopha!
    In Bopha! the usual apartheid-struggle elements never thin out into abstractions. They're elemental, encapsulating a country's tragedy resonantly and powerfully in a single family's. [24 Sept 1993, p.51]
    • Boston Globe
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    Henry Fool
    Writing ignites miracles in Henry Fool, and Hartley's exquisite control over his compositions and pacing makes the outrages, biological and otherwise, funnier than you might believe. [01 Jul 1998]
    • Boston Globe
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    Batman Returns
    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]
    • Boston Globe
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    The Luzhin Defence
    Watson's character grows in importance until she eclipses the recessive Luzhin.
    • Boston Globe
    • 32 Metascore
    • 38 Jay Carr
    Play It to the Bone
    Isn't going to be a contender
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Carr
    Falling Down
    Slickly directed by Joel Schumacher, who sees that each and every button in this unabashedly manipulative film is pushed hard, Falling Down could have been deeply disturbing if it weren't so cartoony, so determined to glibly escape the moral consequences of the vicarious white-rampage fantasies to which it caters. [26 Feb 1993, p.25]
    • Boston Globe
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Chances Are
    "Chances Are is a sweetly likable little romantic comedy that would be even more likable if it didn't require the season's most massive suspension of disbelief. [10 March 1989, p.32]
    • Boston Globe
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    Eat Drink Man Woman
    Lee's light hand with his timeless subjects deftly, affectingly, ruefully and hilariously covers all the bases. [19 Aug 1994, p.49]
    • Boston Globe
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    Winter Sleepers
    Angst-ridden, yet graceful, stylish, and optimistic allegory about swerving off one road and finding your way back via another.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Waydowntown
    The film will resonate with today's alienated workers, whose every brain cell and nerve ending hates the soul-crushing jobs they're told they should be grateful to have.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Avalon
    The film often settles for the sentimental and the anecdotal rather than trying for something richer and deeper, but on those levels it works well enough. Audiences will relate to its warmth and sincerity. Essentially, the film is a series of pages from Levinson's family album and it means something to us because it clearly means something to him. [05 Oct 1990, p.45p]
    • Boston Globe
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    My Cousin Vinny
    My Cousin Vinny is a cement-handed courtroom comedy that somehow lands on its feet when it should fall on its face. In fact, it does fall on its face, more than once. There isn't a single thing in it that you don't know isn't coming. But the chemistry between Joe Pesci as a wiseguy-out-of-water and Marisa Tomei as his shrewd and adorable Brooklyn girlfriend, adrift in the Alabama legal system, keeps it worth watching. [13 Mar 1992, p.28]
    • Boston Globe
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