Jay Carr

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]

The Nightmare Before Christmas is the black diamond of family films, brilliantly conceived, touchingly pure of heart, much more endearing than scary. [22 Oct 1993, p.55]

With unpatronizing empathy, Paris Is Burning beckons us into a subculture. [09 Aug 1991, p.39]

It's got sharp wit and a wise heart, and as good as it was onstage, it's even better as a movie. [22 Dec 1993, p.33]

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]

Bindler's recognition of the rich and intense human drama boiling away beneath the laconic surfaces and underplayed verbalizations turns Hands on a Hardbody into a surprisingly affecting metaphor for American life as an ongoing exercise in endurance. [30 Jul 1999, p.D7]

The Story of Louis Pasteur dates from the golden age of Hollywood biofilm, marked by conviction and craftsmanship. [13 Dec 1991, p.60]

Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant's fresh, gutsy societal underbelly film, never wallows in picturesque down-and-outism, except at the end, when Dillon's character, frightened by the death of a girl he didn't like much and spooked by his own paranoiac suspicion, checks into a seedy hotel while trying to go cold turkey and not yield to the influence of a junkie priest drolly played by William Burroughs. [27 Oct 1989]

Even an experienced director would have his hands full making anything out of this script. Four screenwriters are credited, and as any movie buff knows, the more writers, the worse the movie. Nowhere Faustian, this one aspires to camp classic status, but lurches lamely into vile gross-out territory. [10 Feb 1989, p.48]

You walk out amazed and refreshed by the way it kicks the assumptions out from under the genre.

Those who can endure it will find Kirby Dick's film provocative and surprisingly touching. [14 Nov 1997, p.D11]

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

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]

What Gibson gives us is a portrait of a man behaving gracefully under several kinds of pressure, some of it shamefully unfair. It's a solid acting achievement, and his directing, which never calls attention to itself, is right on the money, too. The Man Without a Face is an affecting evocation of a man of principle who teaches a boy what's important. [25 Aug 1993, p.53]

In the crowded landscape of anti-imperial and anti-colonial film, Claire Denis' Chocolat is a standout. Never raising its voice, avoiding the usual didacticism, Denis brings subtlety, sensitivity and an uncommonly clear personal vision to her memories of colonialism in Africa, where she spent her youth. [31 Mar 1989, p.34]

Living in Oblivion needs more shoot-the-works outrageousness. But even if it thins out, it has an engaging spirit, bright energies and a wry feel for the clashing agendas on the set filled with edgy, starry-eyed pit bulls trying to convince themselves that what they're doing is a career move. [21 July 1995, p.46]

Driving Miss Daisy, about the deepening relationship between a Jewish matron in Atlanta and her black chauffeur, is a luminous joy of a film, heartbreakingly delicate, effortlessly able through indirection to invoke the civil rights era without ever once slipping into portentous pronouncements. [12 Jan. 1990, p.35]

Few, if any, films this year will approach, let alone equal, Autumn Tale in its subtle sparkle.

Although expertly directed by Bill Duke, Deep Cover becomes the cinematic equivalent of a drive-by shooting, posing as community uplift. [15 Apr 1992, p.91]

Somewhat sanitized but gorgeous Americana, with another impressive turn by McTeer.

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]

The Wedding Banquet is one of the year's most joyful film discoveries - multiculturally hip, acted and directed with finesse, full of bright surprises, with lots of heart. [27 Aug 1993, p.81]

In the end, it's much ado about not very much, certainly not enough to catapult Bass into a film career, but probably enough to satisfy 'N Sync fans.

When Branagh's camera soars above the final celebratory dancing and choral anthem, you'll soar, too. [21 May 1993, p.23]

The Eel careens all over the stylistic map, from irony to slapstick. But it's chaos in the service of rebirth and redemption, a rich screenful of zigzagging. [16 Oct 1998, p.C5]

The Scent of Green Papaya is an astonishingly rich evocation of maternal energies and gestures, expressed in lovingly lingered-on images. [25 Feb 1994, p.47]

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.

We're in a golden age of comedy, and one of the reasons is Margaret Cho.