Jay Carr

Gas Food Lodging is a film about nourishment on a financial and emotional shoestring. It's a delight. [19 Sept 1992, p.29]

Fresh is urgent, impressively thought out, tightly coiled. Written, directed and acted with invigorating subtlety, there's nothing stale about Fresh. It's an original, and it's terrific. [31 Aug 1994, p.27]

Not only exhilarating and cathartic. It's too funny to be ignored.

With Carrey hitting a career peak, this Grinch doesn't steal Christmas; it restores the season by helping energize us enough to make it through the whole thing.

It isn't often that lives of quiet desperation are served up with such pearly restraint.

The story is spun forth ravishingly, tenderly, and urgently, with a captivating mix of beauty, spare sophistication, and profound humanity.

It's terse, atmospheric, fatalistic, with vertiginous camera angles and edits offsetting its gray documentary flatness.

On screen as on the page, The Age of Innocence is a stunning period piece filled with depth charges. [17 Sept 1993, p.49]

A feast of a film that goes on feeding you long after you've left the theater. [25 Dec 1995, p.83]

"In Cold Blood," "Badlands," "The Executioner's Song," and now, joining those grisly milestones on the heartland hit list, and every bit their equal, is Boys Don't Cry.

A Bronx Tale is a joy, a film that comes unerringly from someone's heart and experience, and not from a power lunch of agents with clients to be packaged. [1 Oct 1993, p. 49]

The women here aren't afraid to get extreme about love, but in the end, you sense that they are too sound to destroy themselves over the worthless man they have allowed to personify it. That's what lifts Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown from the amusing to the sublime. [23 Dec 1988, p.23]

Naked is one of the most scorchingly compelling films in years, Mike Leigh's masterpiece, an unflinching vision of civilization in retreat, life as apocalypse. [4 Mar. 1994, p.51]

A gorgeous autumnal period piece that catches a vanishing proprietary class on the eve of its extinction in Ireland in 1920.

Terrific French film about that most universal of subjects - work.

Slly, sublime, buoyant mischief that is virtually without parallel in 20th-century art, much less 20th-century film.

Brilliant and impassioned as Day Lewis' performance is, it isn't the only reason this film is so exhilarating. Director Jim Sheridan, who clearly has assimilated Brown's two memoirs (the film takes its name from the first), draws Christy's impoverished Irish family with idiomatic rightness and a satisfying and rare (to American films at least) emotional fullness. [15 Sept, 1989, p.41]

It's one of the great sister movies and one of the great performance movies. [26 Jan 1996]

Casualties of War is just as successful as "Platoon" was in making us feel Vietnam's moment-by-moment tension, but its central event gives it more resonance. [18 Aug 1989, p.43]

The most remarkable accomplishment of Heavenly Creatures is its unfailing ability to compel us to identify with its two young Salomes. They're right to sense that the adult world around them means to snuff them out, and you can understand and even sympathize with their desperate need to muster a preemptive strike so they can stay together. Heavenly Creatures is potent, daring, invigorating filmmaking. [23 Nov 1994, p.29]

One of the films in the running as Charlie Chaplin's funniest and most adroitly balanced between comedy and pathos. [7 Sept 1990]

The greatest B-movie ever made. [Director's Cut; 18 Sept 1998, p.D5]

Quiet, powerful, contemplative, respectful of stillness, Eureka is the first film this year in which there is obvious greatness.

The sly and subtle Minus Man is a wicked little sidewinder of a black comedy.

Quiz Show, Robert Redford's strongest movie yet, has contender written all over it. Swinging from the heels, it connects solidly, powerfully and probingly with the event that triggered America's loss of postwar innocence and erosion of public trust. [16 Sept 1994, p.59]

With its beautifully crafted starburst of colors and themes spanning its requisite Victorian gravity, A Little Princess is a beguiling little supernova of a movie I can't imagine anyone not loving. [19 May 1995, p.64]

Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise isn't just one of France's great love stories - it's one of film's. [23 Feb 1992, p.B35]

In a crisply restored print, it's as joyous as ever. We loved them - yeah, yeah, yeah. Now we can love them all over again.