Jay Carr

Doesn't quite rank with the films that bracket Heckerling's pop-culture high priestess status

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]

Casualties of War is just as successful as "Platoon" was in making us feel Vietnam's moment-by-moment tension, but its central event gives it more resonance. [18 Aug 1989, p.43]

Titanic is a big-budget spectacle and director Cameron brings it off with high-tech bravura, placing us aboard the ship in real time.

Engrossing and eye-opening in several respects and even, when you least expect it, humorous.

Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser doesn't make the mistake of trying to oversell Monk as a colorful personality. It doesn't have to. It simply stands back and allows his genuine originality and unorthodoxy to make their own impressions. [13 Oct 1989, p.37p]

A sleek little poison pill of a movie.

Both a lovingly crafted remembrance of things past and a deliberate broadening and darkening of the canvas Levinson previously filled in "Diner," "Tin Men," and "Avalon."

She's (Dunst) the big reason the film rises above instantly rejectable formula to campy pop.

Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July is a knockout, a huge angry howl of movie that uses a crippled Vietnam veteran's disability as metaphor for a country's paralysis. [5 Jan 1990, p.67]

Cronenberg hasn't so much filmed Naked Lunch as tamed it, turned it into entertainment, with oozy rubber bugs, big and little, that look left over from David Lynch's movie of "Dune," or the intergalactic dive from "Star Wars." [10 Jan 1992]

Natural Born Killers is going to be a love-it or hate-it film. But it's an important film. Pumped up, jumped up, yet asking the right questions, [it] is more than an attention-grabber. It's a grenade pitched into the media tent. [26 Aug 1994, p.51]

Although Watermelon Woman is at times rudimentary and slight, it's saved by its humor and its way of tweaking political correctness. [9 May 1997, p.C6]

Character is almost wholly subordinated to a blast-furnace rendering of the hell into which they're dumped. Seldom will you see so many US military body parts strewn around a movie screen.