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
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Carr
    Mermaids
    Frankly, Mermaids is the kind of movie that needs the strong personalities of Cher and Ryder, and is lucky it has them. They put the movie over. It has a weak script, and the direction by Richard Benjamin - who had two predecessors on this project - is so reticent as to be almost absent. There's almost no pacing or shaping to speak of. [14 Dec 1990, p.53P]
    • Boston Globe
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Married to the Mob
    Married to the Mob is a funny yard sale of a film about regeneration in a junked-up America. [19 Aug 1988]
    • Boston Globe
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    Legally Blonde
    There's always Witherspoon, swimming upstream and never letting it slow her down. Blindingly purposeful, she's a perky blond tornado. Marilyn Monroe would not only have cheered her on. She'd have learned something.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    The Anniversary Party
    Isn't what you'd call a probing film, but it's a slick and savvy one.
    • Boston Globe
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    Red Rock West
    Red Rock West is one of the ongoing reasons noir is a genre that just won't say die. It's one of the most deviously entertaining detours since, well, Detour. [20 May 1994, p.53]
    • Boston Globe
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    Muppetmaster Jim Henson has done a good job of translating the Turtles - and their 4-foot-tall rat guru, Splinter - into animatronic form. [30 Mar 1990, p.28p]
    • Boston Globe
    • 58 Metascore
    • 38 Jay Carr
    Session 9
    You couldn't ask for a better setting for a horror movie. What you could ask for is a better script.
    • Boston Globe
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    The Road Home
    As luminous as the star presence at its center. It's at once a touching teacher movie and an even more touching love story.
    • Boston Globe
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Carr
    White Sands
    Red blood, white sands and a blue Corvette are the real stars of "White Sands," the slick new Roger Donaldson thriller that's more about its plot convolutions than its characters, and more about its visuals than either. [24 Apr 1992, p.85]
    • Boston Globe
    • 50 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    Shaft
    With Jackson leading the way, Shaft has style, punch, and street cred. It's a hot cool update.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Carr
    Blow
    Blew its chance to be an epic drug opera. It's only nostril-deep.
    • Boston Globe
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Finding Forrester
    A juicy and gratifying teacher movie (a genre to which I'm partial). The joy in performance shared by Connery and Brown is the big reason.
    • Boston Globe
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    No Man's Land
    From beginning to end, it bristles with ironies in classic Eastern European absurdist style.
    • Boston Globe
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Girls Town
    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]
    • Boston Globe
    • 55 Metascore
    • 25 Jay Carr
    Back to the Future Part III
    Back to the Future III has no future. The reason is that it never works up much of a past as it sends its gull-winged DeLorean time machine back to the Old West. In effect, it goes back to the Age of Steam and runs out of gas. [25 May 1990, p.45]
    • Boston Globe
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    Child's Play
    Child's Play is junk fun. [09 Nov 1988, p.95]
    • Boston Globe
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Carr
    Cool Runnings
    It's all prefab stuff, rendered acceptable by the sunny dispositions of the performers and the Jamaican location shots. You really have to love bobsledding, or Jamaica, or both, to love Cool Runnings. [1 Oct 1993, p.55]
    • Boston Globe
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Maverick
    Entertaining set pieces, the lively give-and-take of Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster and James Garner and a playful affection for old Westerns carry Maverick past some soft spots and emphasize its adult wit and intelligence. [20 May 1994, p.49]
    • Boston Globe
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Jay Carr
    Alien Nation
    Alien Nation quickly abandons any possibility of an equivalently fascinating world for the formulas of a routine cop movie. [7 Oct 1988, p.40]
    • Boston Globe
    • 42 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    Bicentennial Man
    Few actors apart from Williams could bring it off.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Carr
    What Lies Beneath
    Ford and Pfeiffer deliver craftsmanlike work, but the film steadily unravels as Zemeckis tries to ratchet up the suspense.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould
    There are several kinds of wit at work here - Gould deserved no less - and they add up to an entertainingly offbeat evocation of a stimulating character whose wistful side is touchingly and glancingly evoked as well. [02 Feb 1994, p.66]
    • Boston Globe
    • 58 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    You've Got Mail
    Warm, smart, and funny!
    • Boston Globe
    • 71 Metascore
    • 38 Jay Carr
    Requiem for a Dream
    It's two hours of slumming in a vision of hell hatched from bourgeois comfort. That, and not its unsavory subject matter, is what makes it bummer theater.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    A Perfect World
    In short, it's a gripping film with some surprises that emerge from around the edges. [24 Nov 1993, p.39]
    • Boston Globe
    • 42 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    Joe Somebody
    The cop-out is mitigated by Allen's ability to impart a comfortable, lived-in quality to his roles, this one included.
    • Boston Globe
    • 51 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
    Sequels and fun don't often coincide, but this time they do.
    • Boston Globe
    • 24 Metascore
    • 25 Jay Carr
    Cyborg
    Cyborg is cyboring. [07 Apr 1989, p.34]
    • Boston Globe
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Carr
    My Stepmother Is an Alien
    It falls far short of the lighthandedness, whimsy and feeling it needs to override its slightness. You keep wanting to like it, to match the good will coming out of the actors, but the writing keeps shoving its fabricated nothingness in your face. [09 Dec 1988, p.36]
    • Boston Globe
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    Lean on Me
    Avildsen's - and the screenplay's - blatant manipulations make Freeman's job harder. To his credit, Freeman not only sustains the level of fever pitch at which Clark operates throughout, but succeeds in making him seem admirable, if not exactly likable. A well-meaning steamroller is still a steamroller. Are people who question Clark necessarily wrong? And why, for instance, do the students have to be presented with an either-or picture of Mozart and gospel music? Why can't they have both? The script to Lean on Me plays like something written by the Reagan administration. It supplies a rationale for white-controlled governments to ignore the educational needs of largely black school districts that need funding most. With Freeman breathing inspirational fire, Lean on Me is never dull. But it sidesteps some troubling questions. [3 March 1989, p.43]
    • Boston Globe
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