Jay Carr

The General is a gravely beautiful film (in wide-screen black and white) by John Boorman about an Irish career criminal who was an antiauthoritarian folk hero, a warm family man to a menage a trois, and also a dangerous psychopath.

Lee's light hand with his timeless subjects deftly, affectingly, ruefully and hilariously covers all the bases. [19 Aug 1994, p.49]

Richly textured, beautifully acted.

It's a powerful depth charge of a film about reinvented family values. In Denis's hands, this urgent, loving brother and sister act is lyrical, exhilarating, flecked with mystery. [24 Oct 1997, p.C6]

Miguel Arteta's Star Maps is an uneven first feature, but what's good in it is very good. It's got invigorating rawness to spare, making its low budget work in its favor. [22 Aug 1997, p.F5]

A perfect example of a small, well-made, and (in its central role) rivetingly acted film.

If you don't get hooked on the storytelling in Fried Green Tomatoes, you'll surely be charmed by its five terrific actresses. Fried Green Tomatoes can't match the dramatic focus and rich texture of Rambling Rose, it's far more appealingly nuanced than Steel Magnolias - and with actresses like Tandy, Masterson, Bates, Parker and Tyson on the job, it's downright irresistible. [10 Jan 1992, p.73]

Bell is utterly persuasive as the boy literally yearning to leap beyond the oppressively apparent confines of his world.

With keen-edged direction by Barbet Schroeder and a Richard Price screenplay loaded with venomous savvy, Kiss of Death is the most high-powered and brutal New York gangster movie since "GoodFellas." [21 Apr 1995, p.41]

Melville's austere yet sensuous reinvention of the genre's macho honor and trenchcoated, fedora-wearing iconography, coolly projected by Delon's expressionless face, makes "Le Samourai" a pungent and pleasurable experience still. [02 May 1977, p.D7]

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]

What keeps the film going, and helps it keep its comic tone, is the constant threat of cataclysm - and the deadpan Buster Keaton charm of the ever-responsive Pinon as he combats the giant Rube Goldberg meat-grinder that the house, in effect, is. [17 Apr 1992]

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

What you're not prepared for in Marziyeh Meshkini's astonishing debut film is the way its central image instantly leaps into the pantheon of world cinema with a rightness and an urgency that glue your eyes to the screen.

The film's triumph - and it is a triumph - in the end rests on the ability of Hrebejk and his actors to convince us that they never stop being normal people.

In short, "Crossing Delancey" is a joy of a romantic comedy. It's got warmth, brains, heart and humor. So what's not to like? [18 Sep 1988, p.96]

It starts with a flyboy roasting franks in the exhaust of a combat jet and never lets up, giddily puncturing all those wartime flying hero movies and throwing in a heap of movie parodies besides. Either way, the pacing is jetstreamed and the level of inventiveness is sky-high. [31 July 1991, p.25]

As savage and as epic as film gets.

Throughout the history of film, nothing turns campier faster than dinosaur movies. This one will have a much longer shelf life than most.

It's a treat to encounter the deadpan light-handedness with which Mamet goes about his business.

What gives the film its tension, apart from Hitchcock's masterly manipulation of suspense as he sends them into a wine cellar used to conceal uranium, is his way of connecting with Bergman's masochism and Grant's stoniness as they circle one another, mutually attracted but holding back. [03 Apr 1992, p.94]

Nair, to her credit, doesn't succumb to any special pleading, which deepens her film's impact. Time and again, you sense that she and her subjects come from a place that believes in film, as "Salaam, Bombay" specifies its world and compels us to inhabit it. [15 Sep 1988, p.68]

Mother has a slyly subversive premise and a terrific and commandingly comic role for a woman - which immediately sets it apart from most other American films - and Debbie Reynolds pounces on it with such savvy and self-assurance that it reminds us how funny self-possession can be in the right hands. [10 Jan 1997, p.C3]

I know it's not "Citizen Kane," but it pushes my buttons. [25 March 1994, p.47]

Nobody's going to think of The Score as trail-blazing, but there's nothing small-time about its dramatic and acting payoff.

Every frame in this comic horror story of two unstable sisters tingles with an arresting mix of deadpan humor and yawning dread. [21 Sep 1989, p.60]

Never settling for mere irony, High Hopes becomes a small banner of sanity and good humor among the social ruins. Leigh never shies away from his unflinching dead-end class view of contemporary London. Nor does he wallow in '60s nostalgia. Which is part of the reason his passionate, life-embracing High Hopes is so exhilarating. [31 Mar. 1989, p.30]

A terrific little uppercut of a boxing movie and close to a perfect one.