Jay Carr

Slightly misshapen and unbalanced, with a few loose ends, a few extraneous dream sequences. But there's something going on all the time.

The Trigger Effect is a smarter-than- average thriller that proves David Koepp can direct films as well as write them. [30 Aug 1996, p.F1]

Just what Gooding needed to restart his stalled career.

My Girl is a pleasant surprise. It's sweet, offbeat and ultimately slight, but likable nevertheless for the emotional integrity it maintains in its story of a girl coming to terms with the death of someone close to her. It's one of the few American movies that tries to be honest about death and give kids credit for being able to cope with it, and that alone makes it recommendable. [27 Nov 1991, p.23]

The performances are disarming and Mumford is the kind of comedy that grows on you if you give it a chance.

Spaceballs has the happy air of a comic enterprise that knows it's going right. It just keeps spritzing the gags at us, Borscht Belt-style, confidently and rightly sensing that if we don't laugh at this one, we'll laugh at the next. And so we do. After a long dry spell, Brooks is back on the money with Spaceballs. [24 Jun 1987, p.33]

Shadow Magic isn't interested in psychology or character study. It's a series of tableaux and on that level succeeds admirably.

A steadily engaging and winningly humane film that loves its characters.

It hasn't got a brain in its body, but it's fun to watch.

Pee- wee's Big Adventure is a shrewdly observed, deftly executed looney tune. [9 Aug 1985, p.42]

August's production, while not on a level with either of those memorable predecessors, is solid nonetheless. Its strengths are its handsome amplitude and the intelligent clarity with which the various strands of the novel are advanced by a smoothly meshed international cast. [01 May 1998, p.D4]

Breathes fresh life into old formulas.

Dutifully bleak, suitably oppressive, the film delivers Atwood's desolate who-owns-our-bodies? indictment with intelligence and probity. [09 Mar 1990, p.25p]

Good clean dirty fun.

Lori Petty gives her enough scrappiness on screen to make her a lot of fun to watch. When Tank Girl isn't playing like "Road Warrior" meets "La Femme Nikita," it plays like "The Crow" meets "The Brady Bunch," and it's the ultimate spring-break movie. [31 March 1995, p.57]

An efficient, good-looking production that amounts to the kind of safari with which Disney's customers will feel comfortable. [23 Dec 1994, p.53]

Warm, wry, endearing.

Wind is quite content to keep things at the visual and visceral level, and on that unambitious but highly photogenic plane it's a handsome piece of salt-water escapism. When those sails start popping as they're slapped with gusts of sea air and the tacking gets intense, Wind gives you an adrenaline-filled ride. [11 Sep 1992, p.37]

A solid two-bagger, not a home run.

In the end, Fighter, despite its newsreel footage, is less a document of wartime experience than of the mentality one needs to maintain in order to be a fighter.

A triumph of romantic impulse over stylistic indulgence. [21 Oct 1983]

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]

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

It's got all the energy and idiomatic rightness one could hope for, but, dramatically speaking, it lacks a knockout punch. The violent ending in an alley is flat. One reason may be that the boxing-card scam seems musty and dated. Winkler's got the right friends on camera, but you're never as interested in the story as you are in the characters inhabiting its sunless atmosphere. Night and the City is a qualified success. [23 Oct 1992, p.27]

Karmic influences or not, the new "Mighty Joe Young" works. This is one remake that isn't trying to make us forget the original, but seems rather to embrace it and bring it into the present in solidly crafted, family-friendly fashion. [25 Dec 1998, p.C9]

The liveliest, most original family values film of the year so far.

Hocus Pocus is fun, as Dan Aykroyd used to say, within limits. [16 July 1993, p.40]

The Eel careens all over the stylistic map, from irony to slapstick. But it's chaos in the service of rebirth and redemption, a rich screenful of zigzagging. [16 Oct 1998, p.C5]