Jay Carr

[The novel's] themes have never not been fresh and they gleam here under the sympathetic and enlivening touch of Armstrong and her cast, who move through the events with sunny assurance and complete immersion in character. [21 Dec 1994]

A heady flow of brilliant stupidity.

He's (Dafoe) the stuff bad dreams are made of. He's also the best movie vampire since Schreck's original. He deserves a bloody Oscar.

The film is rightfully carried by Nico and Dani and under Gay's artful helmsmanship it's carried with remarkable sympathy and believability.

The most disorienting and trippiest data-retrieval caper in years.

The kind of richly layered film that Hollywood seldom attempts, much less brings off. But it's more than brought off here in grand, solid style and beautifully crafted detail.

Unstrung Heroes, with its small, detailed brush strokes and its eye for specifics, marks Diane Keaton's directorial breakthrough. [15 Sep 1995]

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]

With Jackson leading the way, Shaft has style, punch, and street cred. It's a hot cool update.

Warm, smart, and funny!

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

Nil by Mouth is a scaldingly invigorating filmaking debut. [06 Mar 1998, p.D7]

Ultimately, charm prevails. Enchanted April can be thought of as "Shirley Valentine" in quadruplicate, with better clothes. You won't see a more exquisite, more civilized feel-good movie this year. [7 Aug 1992, p.32]

Funny, gritty, filled with surprising stabs of feeling, Parenthood is a stretch for Ron Howard, its director. This new adult comedy has the generosity of "Cocoon" and "Splash," but it takes Howard into deeper, darker, messier territory. [2 Aug 1989, p.57]

Fresh, original, and arresting.

With its hypnotic performance by Rooker as Henry, it's most terrifying not in its carnage (although that's terrifying enough), but when it forces us to confront our own blinkered passage through the world, our blindness to the closeness of violent death. [5 Jan 1990, p.69]

Director Penny Marshall's choreography encompasses emotional as well as physical ebbs and flows. Awakenings lives up to its title. [11 Jan 1991]

Quite apart from wringing the last molecule of vividness from his freewheeling roster of loose cannons, he brings to his direction of Martin a finesse shared by only a few of the directors who have worked with the comedian-actor.

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]

Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep is a spicy, propulsive, invigorating paradox - a French film of great gusto about the exhaustion of French film culture. Written in 10 days and shot in four weeks with a very busy Super 16mm camera, it looks and plays as breathlessly as its on-the-fly circumstances. [27 July 1997, p.C8]

If there is any message in Tarkovsky's work, although as a poet he would never stoop to anything as banal as a message, it is that life is an internal affair, played out in one's soul, not in public.

Smart, unpredictable, and alive with the energies of actors who clearly are enjoying being stretched by their material.

Certainly none of Olivier's other contemporary film characters matches Archie's resonances. We're lucky to still have The Entertainer. [04 Aug 1989, p.41]

Like its subject, Pollock is a messy creation, but one whose depth of commitment and high attack keeps it on track.

Beyond its fresh twists on the cop and romance genres, Witness is, above all, an anti-consumption film. [08 Feb 1985]

The cinematic equivalent of a high, arching rainbow of a three-pointer from midcourt.

Warm, intelligent, humane, The Bear is everything you could hope for in an outdoor adventure. [27 Oct 1989, p.33p]

Hurtling from the screen with a vigor and importance that are all but absent from contemporary film, it's a deeply moving social drama, raw and gritty in style, shining with moral purpose as it delivers a scathing take-it-into-the-streets critique of feral capitalism and racism. [18 July 1997, p.D1]