Jay Carr

It's easily the best of the movies I've seen by the various "Saturday Night Live" alumni, and part of the reason it's funny and satisfying is that it doesn't strain. [09 Jun 1983]

School Ties might have been more potent if it were set in the present instead of 1955; still, it's richly drawn, strongly felt, handsomely produced, with a smoldering performance by Brendan Fraser. [18 Sept 1992, p.56]

Angst-ridden, yet graceful, stylish, and optimistic allegory about swerving off one road and finding your way back via another.

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

Loaded with heart, wit, originality, juicy performances and contemporary relevance, Patrice Leconte's Ridicule is one of the most rewarding costume dramas in years. [06 Dec 1996, p.C6]

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]

It's filled with vivid characters and action. Beneath its modesty of gesture, it's one of the year's richest, most humane films.

While it preserves his baseball feats, it looks beyond them to clarify Greenberg's place in American culture.

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]

You keep watching Cobb waiting for the usual lulling cliches of the sports world to arrive, but they never do. Cobb is seething and bleak and unsparing, with a blast-furnace performance by Jones, and there isn't a placating moment in it. [06 Jan 1995, p.52]

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

There's plenty of invention and exuberant vigor in the chopsocky, and Wilson's cool, ironic drollery provides the perfect foil for Chan's heroics.

A League of Their Own may not boost its material into the level of pop myth as, say, last year's great female buddy movie, "Thelma & Louise," did. It's a bit too concerned with being likable to make that kind of bold leap. But if A League of Their Own doesn't knock the ball out of the park, it's a clean hit, with extra bases written all over it. [1 July 1992, p.41]

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.

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]

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]

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]

Reichardt's satire is directed just as devastatingly at present-day mindlessness and its inability to reinvent pop myth as against the cliches people inhabit as a substitute for living. And yet there's an affection for the cultural and spiritual meltdown her film's world embraces. River of Grass is incisive and funny. What's even rarer, it's simultaneously subversive and compassionate. Reichardt is a filmmaker to watch. [15 Dec 1995, p.70]

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]

A story about the ravages of one war on a single man's soul and psyche becomes an eloquent plea for peace.

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]

As bloody as any recent film. But it's shot through with a harsh, stony humor that's invigorating enough to be regarded as a slap back at death.

Lisa Krueger's "Manny & Lo" is the most original and unexpected family-values film of the year. [09 Aug 1996, p.C8]

Riding a mood that's tilted to the jazzy blues that Eddie prefers to Bobby's blasting rock on the car radio, Diamond Men is a sparkly film that's easy to love.

Kevin Costner's epic Wyatt Earp literally and figuratively gives you more of the legendary lawman than any of the other famous movies about him. [24 Jun 1994, p.47]

A hugely entertaining adrenaline rush of a thriller that does a couple of simple things right. That's all it needs to do. First, it casts Harrison Ford in the title role of convicted wife-murderer Richard Kimble, ever scrambling forward, one step ahead of pursuing cops, while hunting the real killer. Second, it never stops. [6 Aug 1993, p.41]

After revitalizing baseball movies with "Field of Dreams" and "Bull Durham," he's now three for three with the funny, quirky, rueful, and richly textured For Love of the Game.

It's the kind of romantic comedy that doesn't cheapen the word ''heartwarming.''