Jay Carr

The Client is slick, but not much more than the sum of its surfaces. [20 July 1994, p.23]

It seems endless. It's also unusually crude and stupid, even for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

A little Hitchcock and some good Psycho fun at the beach.

Although there's a certain connect-the-dots quality to the storytelling, there's no denying the care and craftsmanship that Gardos has brought to her debut film.

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]

Bizarre, shadowy, enticingly eerie...more poetic, more tantalizingly original.

Not since the original ''Star Wars'' trilogy has film dipped into myth and emerged with the kind of weight and heft seen in Peter Jackson's first installment of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

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]

There are some sweet impulses in first-time director Marc Rocco's Dream a Little Dream, but it's a mess. [3 March 1989, p.47]

It isn't afraid to genuflect to heroes and heroism and has everything it needs to connect with the resurgence of patriotism after Sept. 11.

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

The sweetly enticing Smiling Fish and Goat on Fire repays the bit of patience it asks.

It doesn't tap deeply enough into any of the characters to compel us to identify with one or another.

The enormously appealing Randle holds the screen even when the thinness of Suzan-Lori Parks' script becomes inescapably apparent. There isn't much vigorous narrative pulse, complexity or even faceting of Randle's character, and the arbitrary ending seems both forced and inconclusive. [22 Mar 1996, p.53]

Despite a few tangy black comic moments, Lucky Numbers' is bummer theater.

Technically, the film is as sexy as art house sex gets, as the bold and precocious girl initiates the coupling in the "bachelor's room" the man rents in Saigon's teeming Chinese quarter. But the couplings lack heat and intimacy and spontaneity in ways that have nothing to do with the man's tentativeness. What you feel as these scenes unfold isn't passion, but a sense of how carefully the bodies are being arranged, how artfully they're being lit. What we're experiencing here isn't ardor; it's up-market craftsmanship. There's much more of a sexual charge in their first scene together, when he glimpses her on a ferry, is smitten, offers her a ride in his splendid chauffeured limo, tentatively moves his hand toward hers in the back seat, takes a deep breath, touches her hand, then exhales with relief when she doesn't push his hand away. [13 Nov 1992, p.32]

Earth Girls Are Easy is 90 minutes of bubble and squeak that doesn't shrink from sharing its subject's vacuousness. But it works often enough. And when it does, it plays like a collision between Zippy and Hairspray. [12 May 1989, p.45]

Seems embalmed in its own time, an earnest and handsomely crafted museum piece, not an urgent transposition of Miller's moral outrage to the new century.

In the Mouth of Madness is firmly lodged in the armpit of boredom. [03 Feb 1995, p.55]

Sinks under the weight of its ever more inescapably apparent contrivance, and its forced parallels to ''Lear.''

The Freshman, to be fair, offers delights. It's slight, a conceit better written than directed by Alan Bergman, but with flashes of witty satire and moments of screwball charm. [27 July 1990, p.29]

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 end is a long time coming in Reindeer Games and the dialogue is mostly slush.

Structural shortcomings and all -- gives a neglected giant of African independence his due.

Puts the fun back into going to Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. He said he'd be back, and he is.

At least hits a certain adrenaline level, and the stunts have panache. If you crave the ''Young Guns'' approach to the Old West, here it is again.

[Verhoeven's] cold, slick, funny, high-powered movie is informed by a humanism this genre almost always abandons in its chase after vigilante splat. [17 Jul 1987]

Junior isn't brilliant. A lot of its moves are as patently synthetic as Schwarzenegger's prosthetic stomach. But it goes through its paces with directness and savvy, arranges its big, bold elements into a likable pop construct (if you tune out the music), and some of Schwarzenegger's moves into motherhood will surprise you. [23 Nov 1994, p.25]