Jay Carr

This smart Richard III looks terrific, moves like the wind and rides the nerve of McKellen daring us not to enjoy its central monster's evil panache. [19 Jan 1995, p.57]

A miracle of data retrieval as the grown schoolchildren are measured against their footage from the earlier films.

Farnsworth's embodiment of old American values, with their combination of delicacy, reserve, and stand-alone independence, is a one-of-a-kind treasure.

The surehandedly wrought, beautifully acted, almost unbearably tense In the Bedroom is a rare film, not to be missed.

Newman is an American classic, one of the few actors Hollywood has allowed to age and deepen. He and Nobody's Fool don't so much shine as glow softly and steadily. [13 Jan 1995, p.73]

It's the best drug-busting movie since ''The French Connection.''

It's also [Coppola's] most gloriously extravagant film since "One from the Heart." [12 Aug 1988]

"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.

It's a stunningly stylized, fiercely emotional one-of-a-kind film that seals in amber the horrors of a life the director couldn't wait to escape. [18 Sep 1988, p.96]

His (Green) new gross-out comedy is crude and stupid, but just as often rudely funny. It doesn't so much push the envelope as shred it.

It frankly doesn't match the franchise-renewing freshness of The Little Mermaid and the mythic core and emotional depth of Beauty and the Beast, but it has something neither of those films had - Robin Williams' scatty brilliance as the jolly Blue Genie, who carries Aladdin past some generic ordinariness that goes with the new feature's slick, zappy, computer-generated up-to-dateness and topicality. [25 Nov 1992, p.35]

Varda's charmingly eccentric amble, wise in its seeming waywardness.

Most of all it's the emotional and spiritual arc of an exile, in all its terrible isolation, that gives ''Before Night Falls'' its power.

Intriguing, arresting, delightfully refusing to be pigeonholed.

Satisfying in every respect, it's a piece of blue-collar chamber music, never treating the characters cheaply, allowing them a complex entwinement of emotions.

Snazzy visuals, of which she (Moss) is one, carry The Matrix past its klutzy script.

Mostly, though, Lynch fills the screen with a lot of cynically off-putting and sadistic violence. In place of incident, character and a bemused view of small-town life, corrupt beneath its cherry-pie surface, we are essentially asked to witness torture - mostly of Laura Palmer, as her troubles lead her to self-destruct with drugs and promiscuity, including a couple of side trips to the Canadian bordello known as One-Eyed Jacks. For all the violence in Lynch's "Blue Velvet," that film maintained a comic dimension. The violence in "Wild at Heart," for all its extravagance of gesture, was hollow - stylized, not real...Here, there's no comedy, nothing surreal, just wave after wave of titillation. Except that it doesn't titillate. It depresses. There's no psychic charge on any of it. It proceeds from no artistic conviction, just from a cynical desire to squeeze a few more bucks from the already overworked corpse of Laura Palmer. It shows how quickly a creative impulse can be exhausted - from quirky originality toying with humanity's darker impulses to dispirited quasi-porn. [29 Aug 1992, p.23]

From the first bracing hint of self-mockery in its title to its smoky, after-hours resolution, it's a grabber and a delight, constantly surpassing our expectations. [13 Oct 1989, p.35]

A big, dark juggernaut of a movie about a big, dark juggernaut of a subject.

If you thought ''Moulin Rouge,'' or, for that matter, ''Tommy,'' was trippy, Hedwig, with its glorious convergence of material and performer, will show you what you've been missing.

Berlinger has approached Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 with intelligence and even a bit of thematic heft. But, frankly, the cheap thrill is gone.

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]

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]

A solid, not to say ironclad, winner in the less than overcrowded family animation arena.

Sensuous and rarefied, elevating its particulars into epiphanies, The Long Day Closes is as joyful as introversion gets. [9 July 1993, p.25]

Powerful as the archival material is, the most loaded footage is of these survivors back on the pain-drenched turf of their Hungarian origins and the blood-drenched soil of the former concentration camps they outlived. Given the moral authority of their presence, the film doesn't need extraneous drama, and wisely avoids it. [26 Feb 1999, p.D4]

Such moral outrage, apart from the artistry in which it is embedded, tells us that the forces of change are stirring in Iran.

Shining with freshness and commitment, Get On the Bus is one of the far from overwhelming number of films you owe it to yourself to see in 1996. [16 Oct 1996, p.F1]