Jay Carr

The film works because Raimi's motor-rhythmed pop sensibility was ready to take off in this movie, and does, in a series of wonderfully hyperkinetic comic-strip lurches. [24 Aug. 1990, p.34]

Vincent and Theo is one of the great Robert Altman films... It's Altman's most structurally conventional film, although it's filled with such trademarks as overlapping conversations. It's also his most personal and deeply felt. [16 Nov 1990, p.81]

Soapdish should have been a laugher. But this new spoof of TV soaps isn't nearly as funny as the real thing. Soapdish holds only the merest sliver of entertainment. [31 May 1991, p.28]

Harris means to give us a realistic look at contemporary African-American women and succeeds impressively. [09 Apr 1993, p.46]

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

It isn't afraid to genuflect to heroes and heroism and has everything it needs to connect with the resurgence of patriotism after Sept. 11.

The Pillow Book is Peter Greenaway's most stunning and accessible film since "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover." Dense, gorgeous and inexorable - once you give yourself over to its logic - it's a boldly erotic explosion of Asian chic, taken to places no film has gone before. [20 Jun 1997]

A comedy of chaos, an ensemble comedy, with characters swirling around one another unaware, in their uniform desperation, of how funny they are.

Winkler fills the screen with some first-rate actors doing first-rate work. It's a handsomely crafted film as well as an honorable one. But it's also, on the whole, dramatically flat. [15 Mar 1991, p.41]

Reveals real feelings.

Cleverly mixing shamelessness and panache, Wes Craven's New Nightmare is easily the most dazzlingly self-referential seventh installment in a horror series ever. [14 Oct 1994, p.60]

it's an OK genre movie, providing an honest quota of scares and carried by Hoffman's way of alternating stoniness and warmth as the guy in the anticontamination suit. [10 Mar 1995, p.49]

Jim McKay's funky, spunky "Girls Town" is a refreshing girls-who-fight-back film that succeeds in being political without ever being didactic. [30 Aug 1996, p.F4]

Hot Shots! revels in absurdity. At times it's as surreal as the Marx Brothers. [21 May 1993, p.26]

Clockwatchers may not be perfect, but it's on to something. [22 May 1998, p.D5]

The pure joy of music-making is what this gem of a film is all about.

Captures the ensemble quality it was after and the provisional look and feel are perfect stylistic analogues to the lives - the male lives, anyway - that it's portraying.

There are many things that Better Than Sex is better than, although sex is not among them. It is better than a root canal, an IRS audit, or a rained-out ballgame.