Jay Carr

More self-mockery is needed, less self-regard. [07 Apr 1995, p.90]

Gray's haunted, obsessional riffs are absorbing theater. Because Demme had the good sense to lay back and not beat them over the head with his cameras, they're equally compelling on film. [27 Mar 1987]

Likable, go-with-the-flow comedy.

Although his (Jarmusch) films have moments of sly obliqueness, they leave us feeling stranded in underdevelopment. This is the case with Night on Earth, which is launched on a promising conceit - nocturnal taxi rides in five cities around the world during the same time slot. By the time the film ends, we can't help wondering just who has been taken for a ride. [15 May 1992, p.85]

The skies are thick with whizzing bullets and strings being pulled by Shane Black's crude script and Richard Donner's cement-mixer direction. Predictably, the chicks-and-ammo stuff is punctuated by TV cop show repartee. [6 Mar 1987, p.36]

Best when it's playful, toying with the fact that the Mafia has in a single generation been transmogrified from myth to joke.

Jude is a modernized version of Hardy, but a handsome, fluid and red-blooded one that has no difficulty finding correlatives to the prejudice and hatred of wit and spirit against which Hardy, in his gimlet-eyed way, so passionately attacked. [25 Oct 1996]

It epitomizes the kind of high-profile bloodshed we now expect to herald the hazy, lazy, blockbuster-fixated days of summer.

Cronenberg hasn't so much filmed Naked Lunch as tamed it, turned it into entertainment, with oozy rubber bugs, big and little, that look left over from David Lynch's movie of "Dune," or the intergalactic dive from "Star Wars." [10 Jan 1992]

It turns the nerve-fraying Cuban missile crisis into a big pop myth with the grip of a vise.

Lisa Krueger's "Manny & Lo" is the most original and unexpected family-values film of the year. [09 Aug 1996, p.C8]

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]

Needs less down-to-earth flavor and more unearthly force.

It's not quite as jolting as the high-impact original, but it's got enough explosiveness to blow away the other sequels in this summer's parade of high-body-count blockbusters. [4 July 1990, p.29]

If Blaze is a bit mushy, it's also more than skin deep. It's the kind of film whose shortcomings are easy to minimize. It's a muted last hurrah for a departed and worthy brand of populism, but a hurrah all the same. [13 Dec 1989, p.66P]

Man Bites Dog brings new meaning to the term guilty pleasure...You will by now be thinking that "Man Bites Dog" isn't easy to take. It isn't. But the viciousness of its violence is justified by the fact that it isn't exploitative. It's there to indict exploitation and complicity...It's "Sweeney Todd" filtered through "Spinal Tap," shock theater designed to remind us that we conveniently downplay our central role in the media's preoccupation with violence. [30 Apr 1993, p.50]

Isn't much more than ''Baise-Moi'' in business suits as they deconstruct sisterhood with an expense account, but their duets sizzle.

A bit of a cop-out, wrapping in wistful sentimentality a failure to acknowledge a connection that is more than epidermal.

While the appeal of Guinevere is decidedly intermittent, it's there, and the acting is right on the money.

Although expertly directed by Bill Duke, Deep Cover becomes the cinematic equivalent of a drive-by shooting, posing as community uplift. [15 Apr 1992, p.91]

It's slick, but also heartfelt. It's for those who think it's cool to watch "Brady Bunch" reruns and uncool to watch MTV, and it's got terrific performances by Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke and Ben Stiller, who also directs this very appealing canter through the vocational and emotional minefields of our downsizing trash culture. [18 Feb 1994, p.33]

Arachnophobia wants to be Jaws or The Birds, with killer spiders. It isn't. The movie lacks the skill really to tap our primal fears, and the spiders are the only things that don't seem mechanical in Arachnophobia. [18 July 1990, p.65P]

There are moments when faltering levels of energy and inventiveness threaten to turn Too Much Sleep into a nonevent. But it signals the arrival of a promising filmmaker and is worth sticking with.

There isn't a single chase scene in The Russia House. There's scarcely a love scene. And it dares to be slow. But it's attached to feelings as few spy movies are - and as even le Carre's book was not. The greatest compliment one can pay The Russia House is to say that it's the kind of spy movie that's making spy movies obsolete. [21 Dec 1990, p.49p]

Nicholson, Hunt, and Kinnear will win you over as they turn the film into a valentine to New York's walking wounded.

Begins with that invigoratingly nervy and imaginative buzz. But its chic indictment of empty materialist values fizzles.

It begins promisingly.... But the film has no center, succumbs to drift, and gets away from Hackford. [03 Mar 1984]

Enough originality and emotional weight to keep you engrossed even when it lapses into some pretty standard moves at the end.