Jay Carr

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Boston Globe
For 1,227 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 64% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 34% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.7 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Jay Carr's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Husbands and Wives
Lowest review score: 0 Beaches
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 845 out of 1227
  2. Mixed: 223 out of 1227
  3. Negative: 159 out of 1227
1227 movie reviews
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per page
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Carr
    Along Came a Spider
    Efficient, but in the end quite pedestrian.
    • Boston Globe
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    Guilty by Suspicion
    Winkler fills the screen with some first-rate actors doing first-rate work. It's a handsomely crafted film as well as an honorable one. But it's also, on the whole, dramatically flat. [15 Mar 1991, p.41]
    • Boston Globe
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Carr
    Fatal Instinct
    What Fatal Instinct seems to overlook, though, is that erotic thrillers such as "Basic Instinct" and "Fatal Attraction" do a pretty good job of parodying themselves. Rather than really develop any of their setups, writer David O'Malley and director Carl Reiner seem to think it's enough simply to cite the originals. [29 Oct 1993, p.51]
    • Boston Globe
    • 55 Metascore
    • 25 Jay Carr
    Phar Lap
    Phar Lap wastes its brilliant potential through embarrassingly inept acting, a cloying soundtrack, stereotyped characters and pedestrian direction. [13 Jul 1984]
    • Boston Globe
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    Traffic
    It's the best drug-busting movie since ''The French Connection.''
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Carr
    Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
    Watching it is a nonstop high.
    • Boston Globe
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser
    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]
    • Boston Globe
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    Nil by Mouth
    Nil by Mouth is a scaldingly invigorating filmaking debut. [06 Mar 1998, p.D7]
    • Boston Globe
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    The Yards
    By the end, we're left with a feeling of depletion rather than resolution, which may have been Gray's intention.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    Bringing Out the Dead
    While heartfelt and beautifully crafted, Bringing Out the Dead is too freighted with its protagonist's failed savior complex and is surprisingly lacking in primal impact.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    My First Mister
    Risks seeming too earnestly therapeutic for its own good. But what makes My First Mister a successful feature directing debut for Lahti is the emotional veracity it summons.
    • Boston Globe
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    Enchanted April
    Ultimately, charm prevails. Enchanted April can be thought of as "Shirley Valentine" in quadruplicate, with better clothes. You won't see a more exquisite, more civilized feel-good movie this year. [7 Aug 1992, p.32]
    • Boston Globe
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    The Kid
    Too bad The Kid gets bogged down in its sentimental manipulations. It has more going for it than you might suppose.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    Stardom
    Denys Arcand has satiric fun with the media's way of taking celebrity culture at face value and nothing but. Eventually, though, the film becomes what it's ridiculing.
    • Boston Globe
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Carr
    The Time Machine
    The best thing about the new film of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine is the machine.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Joy Ride
    It's a snazzy, smartly made, and even hip little scarefest. As a jump-start to Halloween, it's all you could hope for.
    • Boston Globe
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Rumble in the Bronx
    Kinetic, fizzy, delivering more bounce to the ounce than anything out there right now, "Rumble in the Bronx" is my kind of mindless fun. [23 Feb 1996]
    • Boston Globe
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    Parenthood
    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]
    • Boston Globe
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    Red Heat
    There's always something touching about the diligence with which Schwarzenegger soldiers through his assignments. There's a play of intelligence and decency in his eyes that exists quite independently of his bashing. Of the Hollywood tribe of virile fists, he's the one who seems most sensitive. [17 Jun 1988, p.31]
    • Boston Globe
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    The Cat's Meow
    Could have been -- and should have been -- richer and more resonant. It's Hollywood Babylon Lite, only TV movie-deep. But at least it's tangy.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Carr
    A Brief History of Time
    It's more than science, more than biography, more than metaphor. Fusing all three and linking them to a profound human dimension that never cheapens the man or his macrospeculations, it ties them to shared human destiny. As Morris' elliptical style circles and deepens its themes with each pass, A Brief History of Time turns into film's own expanding universe. [14 Sep 1992, p.50]
    • Boston Globe
    • 44 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    Committed
    Runs dry amid the cactus and sagebrush, but Graham's cartoony take on angelic unstoppableness makes us not mind so much.
    • Boston Globe
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Carr
    On the Line
    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.
    • Boston Globe
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Living in Oblivion
    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]
    • Boston Globe
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    Ratcatcher
    Fresh, original, and arresting.
    • Boston Globe
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Eternity and a Day
    It's poetic, resonant, wistful, convulsive, regretful, exultant. There also are times when it's demanding to sit through, when time passes slowly, urged on only by flickers of uncertainty on the face of its protagonist, or by his insistent peering after meanings that may not even exist. But it's also a film that offers the kinds of rewards possible only to the contemplative mindset. [25 Jun 1999, p.D5]
    • Boston Globe
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
    With its hypnotic performance by Rooker as Henry, it's most terrifying not in its carnage (although that's terrifying enough), but when it forces us to confront our own blinkered passage through the world, our blindness to the closeness of violent death. [5 Jan 1990, p.69]
    • Boston Globe
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Carr
    The Distinguished Gentleman
    The film is content to remain at the level of the mildly entertaining, with no real surprises and not much sass. [04 Dec 1992]
    • Boston Globe
    • 43 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Needful Things
    Solid B-level stuff, better than most filmed King novels. [27 Aug 1993, p.81]
    • Boston Globe
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    My Cousin Vinny
    My Cousin Vinny is a cement-handed courtroom comedy that somehow lands on its feet when it should fall on its face. In fact, it does fall on its face, more than once. There isn't a single thing in it that you don't know isn't coming. But the chemistry between Joe Pesci as a wiseguy-out-of-water and Marisa Tomei as his shrewd and adorable Brooklyn girlfriend, adrift in the Alabama legal system, keeps it worth watching. [13 Mar 1992, p.28]
    • Boston Globe
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