Jay Carr

Oleanna slips to the level of a crass political cartoon, not an examination of human conduct embracing its problematic complexity. And after the first meeting blows up in his face, you can't believe the prof and the student would meet again alone in his office. There's nothing bringing them and keeping them together except the playwright's need to play out his scenario. [11 Nov 1994, p.47]

Serendipity returns us, if only for a couple of hours, to the Manhattan of our dreams.

Thanks to Chen's eye and the strong central performances, Farewell My Concubine comes together with historical resonance and stirring, full-blooded sweep. [29 Oct 1993, p.51]

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]

Dramatically speaking, The Caveman's Valentine is a dead end.

The most remarkable accomplishment of Heavenly Creatures is its unfailing ability to compel us to identify with its two young Salomes. They're right to sense that the adult world around them means to snuff them out, and you can understand and even sympathize with their desperate need to muster a preemptive strike so they can stay together. Heavenly Creatures is potent, daring, invigorating filmmaking. [23 Nov 1994, p.29]

Lane does know how to photograph his own interesting, large-eyed face to potent effect. He's an appealing talent, and Sidewalk Stories is a likable film. Beyond novelty value, it also finds modern ways of making contact with the very real feel for poverty that was so much a part of the early Chaplin films. [21 Sep 1989, p.60]

The film never drags, but one of the enjoyable things about it is its way of taking its time letting us get to know and savor the characters.

Hits mostly flat notes, then a few really sour ones.

One of the films in the running as Charlie Chaplin's funniest and most adroitly balanced between comedy and pathos. [7 Sept 1990]

A big, handsome throwback to star-powered historical costume movies.

In all respects, from choice of material to fullness of execution on every level, The War Zone is an extraordinary piece of work.

As engaging as it is ungainly and scattered.

Gives three first-rate actors a chance to stretch, and they do.

Doesn't make nearly the ripple it could have made.

In short, Almodovar opens some new doors to his artists here, and they respond in surprising, captivating ways. [29 Mar 1996]

Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte are back in Another 48 HRS., and so is some of the chemistry between them. But although this sequel is more amped up than the original "48 HRS.," most of the thrills are gone. [8 Jun 1990, p.35]

Soderbergh's sleekly malignant Underneath is a nasty little winner. [28 April 1995, p.81]

It's a much better bad movie than the first one. It isn't often in Hollywood that a director gets the chance to go back and essentially remake a failed film but Lambert, refusing to let sleeping cadavers lie, gets the job done this time. [28 Aug 1992, p.50]

The greatest B-movie ever made. [Director's Cut; 18 Sept 1998, p.D5]

There are a few tonal glitches, but Newell's hand is remarkably sure, the actors are winning, and Into the West is a treat. [17 Sep 1993, p.54]

It's rare that a crime movie achieves such emotional complexity, but this one is smartly layered.

Turbo-charged wallbanger with the IQ of a tire iron. But it jumps off the screen with the mindless panache of a good bad movie.

Sommersby is a handsome throwback to a kind of film that hardly gets made anymore. It's a richly textured period love story powered by two charismatic and intelligent star performances, with a fullness and amplitude that one more readily associates with quality studio films of the past rather than the MTV quick-cut present. [05 Feb 1993, p.25]

once Carpenter delivers his throwback-to-the-'50s visuals, complete with plump little B-movie flying saucers, and makes his point that the rich are fascist fiends, They Live starts running low on imagination and inventiveness. The big alley-fight scene between Piper and David, in which the former tries to punch some awareness into the latter and make him put on the X-ray sunglasses, is as contrived as it is brutal. And the ending isn't much. The acting has the good sense not to try to be anything more than two-dimensional, though, which keeps the entertainment value at a lively comic-strip level. As sci-fi horror comedy, "They Live," with its wake-up call to the world, is in a class with "Terminator" and "Robocop," even though its hero doesn't sport bionic biceps. [4 Nov 1988, p.52]

It's got flashes of brilliance from Tom Hanks as an unstable comedian whose desperation gives his routines their edge. It's also got an embarrassing performance by Sally Field as a frazzled New Jersey housewife who, late in the game, confronts her resentful family and says, "I want to be a mom, I want to be a wife, and I want to be a comedienne." On the whole, Punchline does not wear its schizophrenia well. [7 Oct 1988, p.38]

A high-impact, high-powered mess that raises the bar for over-the-topness.

Henry & June is a gorgeous film, one aimed at the intelligent and discriminating. As iconography, it's a stunner. But it would be better off as a silent. It's an example of talent and intelligence determined to do everything right, only to have almost everything come out wrong. [05 Oct 1990, p.53p]

Onstage, Noises Off was a riot. On film, it's in the salvage business, snatching a few vagrant laughs from a reworking that otherwise sinks like a failed souffle, reminding us yet again that farce onstage and farce on film are two fundamentally different constructs. [20 March 1992, p.30]

In both senses of the word, Posse is a colorful outing that fills a real gap, a film you can respect as well as enjoy. [14 May 1993, p.45]

Pacific Heights is the hot fall thriller Hollywood has been waiting for. A slick, jolting successor to "Jagged Edge," "Fatal Attraction" and "Sea of Love," it beats the odds by inducing us to sympathize with a San Francisco yuppie landlord couple stuck with a tenant from hell. [28 Sept 1990, p.45]

Johnny Suede is too devoid of content to sustain our interest. [19 Sep 1992]

It's got flaws, but, more important, it's keenly felt and it boils off the screen with urgency. [13 Dec 1991, p.66]

At times, the dead space in Escape from L.A. becomes impossible to ignore. But if it never quite becomes the wild ride it sets out to be, it's seldom boring to watch, either. [09 Aug 1996, p.C6]

One of the great newspaper comedies. [24 Nov 1989, p.112p]

Quiet, powerful, contemplative, respectful of stillness, Eureka is the first film this year in which there is obvious greatness.

Nicholson, Hunt, and Kinnear will win you over as they turn the film into a valentine to New York's walking wounded.

There's warmth and a kind of benevolence in bed with them, too, and it carries the film past its compromises. If White Palace is no "Last Tango in Paris," it's at least a sizzling, fat-free "Last Hamburger in St. Louis." [19 Oct 1990, p.33]

Conspicuously short on the kind of texture that makes us feel we're watching real people living real lives.

Larceny at its most labored.

Unless you're on its let's-laugh-at-the-loonies wavelength, The Dream Team is singularly unfunny. The writing and direction are smugly vacant, behaving as if the basic concept is so innately hilarious that neither need bother fleshing it out with characterization and inventiveness. The only thing prodigious about The Dream Team is its cheap witlessness. It makes Rain Man look like King Lear. [07 Apr 1989, p.35]

A Very Brady Sequel is a little like the meatloaf prepared by Alice, the Bradys' maid - padded, but palatable. It walks a line between evoking the old TV show and kidding it and it's as surprisingly lively a sequel as the original was for a big-screen treatment of an old TV staple. [23 Aug 1996, p.F4]

A Knight's Tale, will either repel you or win you over. It won me over.

More machine than mean, although it's anything but a smoothly running operation.

Stylish and arrives at a satisfying cumulative weight, even if it isn't Austen pure.

There's wonder and mystery in "The Secret of Roan Inish," a handful of utterly convincing characters, knit together by Sayles' ability to freight their naturalistic moves with larger, deeper meanings. [24 Feb 1995, p.71]

The imagery is lush, but the story is pretty cornball, with an ending that can only be called pure Hollywood. Only the marvelous Cate Blanchett transcends stereotype.

A climactic explosion is too obviously a rigged gunpowder charge, and it becomes a metaphor for the film's mistake of diminishing the frantic motion that kept things fizzy and fun.

Deserves a place alongside "Life Is Beautiful" and, yes, even "Schindler's List."

For a movie that's supposed to be sex-driven, Jade has the sexual energy of a dead battery. [13 Oct 1995, p.42]

The reason Bread and Roses works as well as it does is that as didactic as it sometimes gets, its heart is always bigger than its ideology.

Spielberg has said that in their collaboration, cut short by Kubrick's death, Kubrick had opened his heart as never before. Although the fingerprint of each is upon A.I, there are times when the prints are blurred and merged. And this film will blur the hitherto distinctive profiles of each.

While Q & A derails, it's still marked by a love of language and a genuine civic passion that isn't afraid to face ugly facts, and of how many films can that be said? [27 Apr 1990, p.29p]

Filled with affection and verve and will do very nicely until the next shipment of Latin jazz comes along.

A firm, ringing yes and no on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. The best thing about it may be that it will lead many back to read -- or re-read -- the book.

The Dead Pool is not a subtle movie or a bloodless one, although it does manage to put its own twist on the usual car chase sequence. [13 Jul 1988, p.59]

A witless mess with more scriptwriters than laughs. [12 May 1989, p.46]

Shirley Valentine only intermittently captures the wistfulness and tough-minded humor Collins is so good at dispensing. The rest of the time, it's far from bracing. [22 Sept 1989, p.31]

In its zeal to counter the negativity usually found in depictions of Mormons, God's Army eventually succumbs to overearnestness, sentimentality, and cliche.

The B-movie is still very much with us.

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

Delightful and original, the film conjures up a corner of Paris distinct and specific, yet fairy-tale fanciful.

You won't feel raped by it, but you well may feel that it's too ideologically earnest for the porn crowd and too hard-core for serious audiences.

Surviving Picasso is always intelligent and often entertaining, even when it perhaps inevitably takes on the character of an upmarket wax museum. [4 Oct 1996]

Disclosure is a classic guilty pleasure. You won't be proud of yourself in the morning for having watched it, but you won't be able to take your eyes off it while you do. [9 Dec 1994, p.53]

The pure joy of music-making is what this gem of a film is all about.

Stone's film rolls off the screen with affection and authority, even when Morrison's life enters its sodden, bummed-out finale, and Val Kilmer does an uncanny job of identifying with Morrison. [01 Mar 1991]

Arachnophobia wants to be Jaws or The Birds, with killer spiders. It isn't. The movie lacks the skill really to tap our primal fears, and the spiders are the only things that don't seem mechanical in Arachnophobia. [18 July 1990, p.65P]

Neil Jordan's High Spirits wants to be a supernatural comedy. But it isn't super, it isn't natural, it isn't high, and it isn't spirited. [18 Nov 1988, p.33]

Billy Crystal's wit and sweet energies carry it past what could have been a fatal degree of mushiness. Although there's rather too much redemption for one cattle drive, and the film's attitude toward women is at best opaque, Crystal brings warmth and ease to his sharp timing and edgy comic style as he and his pals entertainingly usher us into their brotherhood of schlepdom. [7 June 1991, p.53]

Here's the third classic you'd better know if you're going to know anything about American gangster movies. This one is powered by Paul Muni's thinly disguised and daringly simian take on Al Capone. [01 Nov 1991, p.35]

A humane alternative that makes the phrase family values mean something. [14 July 1995, p.33]

It's more of a throwback to one of the first SNL movie spinoffs, Steve Martin's "The Jerk." It's loaded with physical comedy and enlists Farley's SNL foil, David Spade, to serve as Abbott to Farley's Costello. Farley plays the blimp on uppers, Spade plays the pinched little know-it-all nerd with a chip - a computer chip, probably - on his shoulder. What mostly keeps it going is the sheer gusto with which Farley throws himself into the clowning. It's passably entertaining if you don't think about it too much - and to see it is to realize that it works mightily at getting you to not think too much. [31 March 1995, p.59]

Brings the '30s vividly to the screen.

The question facing the target audience for Scary Movie is whether the funny bits will be enough of a payoff for sitting through the tedious stuff between them.

The Graduate is not subtle in its writing off of the parental generation as hopelessly corrupt. [Review of re-release]

Few directors lavish as much tenderness upon life's bruised survivors as Kloves does, and many a more prominent director has failed to find in the dust-choked West Texas plains the wistfulness with which Quaid and Ryan fill their most solid and shtick-free work yet. [05 Nov 1993, p.42]

A clever and satisfyingly abundant entertainment.

The kind of movie you can enjoy easily enough, as long as you don't think about it much.

It has a few laughs, but it also has a lot of dead air, and barely any plot at all. In sporting terms, it's no home run.

The Accused is far from a perfect film, but it's got a terrific performance by Foster, a pretty good one by McGillis, and Lansing's knack for casting women's issues in a form that makes people go see them at the movies. [14 Oct 1988, p.49]

Robinson's impassioned decency and coruscating invective make "How to Get Ahead in Advertising" a high-minded, invigorating mess. [19 May 1989, p.47]

Reveals real feelings.

Like the earlier film version, this one often exchanges the dark poetry of Golding's writing for action and connect-the-dots social anthropology, but it's crisp, taut and involving nonetheless. [16 Mar 1990, p.39]

It'll satisfy genre fans and Lee fans and win new adherents to the Asian-style action film, with its dazzling moves that make conventional Hollywood movies look like cement mixers in low gear. [7 May 1993, p.25]

From start to finish there's a shimmer of discovery about it - our discovery of it, Coppola's discovery of how much she can do.

Von Trier's visuals are stunning enough to almost conceal the hollowness of his elliptical story. [03 Jul 1992, p.42]

There's justification for Hearst's bitter reflection that her real crime consisted in surviving. There's also some intelligent work in Patty Hearst. Still, it's more pat and less disturbing than you feel it should be. [23 Sep 1988, p.56]

Plays like a dislocated version of ''Death in Venice,'' but in a dryer, higher climate that features exponentially more firepower.

Perhaps not the most uproarious of Veber's farces, but entertaining and emotionally satisfying all the same.

The film's most remarkable achievement, in this culture of clamor, simply may be its decision to keep the volume down, drawing us in as opposed to pummeling us, as most films do.

While the film grabs us on cue with its sudden strikes that end with blood dripping from the monster's dragon fangs as it zips back into the dark, it's also true that predictability robs the thrust and counterthrust of the purely visceral impact it once had. The monsters just aren't that scary anymore, and so the film mostly just sits there, gloomy and inert, sunk in exhausted myth, looking and sounding Wagnerian but feeling underpowered despite its diversionary moves. [22 May 1992, p.29]

The script is a little too clunky to serve Ricki Lake well, and Richard Benjamin's direction is a bit too sluggish to disguise her limited range as he crams this romantic fairy tale a little too forcefully into its predetermined mold. [19 Apr 1996, p.53]

Jude is a modernized version of Hardy, but a handsome, fluid and red-blooded one that has no difficulty finding correlatives to the prejudice and hatred of wit and spirit against which Hardy, in his gimlet-eyed way, so passionately attacked. [25 Oct 1996]

For all its propulsion (when it isn't slogging through would-be love scenes), Metro is unable to avoid seeming like yet another of the vanity movies that got Murphy into the career trouble from which he just extricated himself. Murphy vulnerable is more appealing than Murphy as supercop. [17 Jan 1997, p.D6]

The more intense it gets, the sillier it looks. The only thing worth watching in this wannabe noir is Christian Clemenson's performance as Spader's permanently bummed-out pot-smoking brother. Clemenson alone fills the screen with the kind of individuality that makes you steadily deepen your belief in his character. But he's not enough to keep Bad Influence from degenerating into a ludicrous turn-off. [09 Mar 1990, p.27]

This engaging ensemble comedy that could have been called ''Father Doesn't Know Best.''

The sly and subtle Minus Man is a wicked little sidewinder of a black comedy.

Gallo has delivered a clever suspense comedy that, thanks to a taut script, creative direction, and first-rate performances from its leads, gives Double Take more weight than one would expect from a genre crowd-pleaser.

A lame little flat liner.

A strong ending might have obscured the mediocrity in the writing, or at least diverted us, but the ending is sentimental where it needed to be hard-edged and comically merciless. For a film about people hurtling forward, Rat Race is pretty pedestrian.

It's hard to find the movie unpleasant, but it's hard to imagine it causing any strong reaction at all.

Quiz Show, Robert Redford's strongest movie yet, has contender written all over it. Swinging from the heels, it connects solidly, powerfully and probingly with the event that triggered America's loss of postwar innocence and erosion of public trust. [16 Sept 1994, p.59]

Isn't much more than ''Baise-Moi'' in business suits as they deconstruct sisterhood with an expense account, but their duets sizzle.

Ju Dou is far richer and more jolting than "The Postman Always Rings Twice," which it suggests. When it comes to film noir entrapment, we have nothing on the Chinese. [05 Sep 1990, p.63p]

Stumbles over its own clumsiness until it goes down for the count.

French Kiss is a French miss. It's got the settings, but it has little magic, less charm and almost no chemistry between Meg Ryan's heartsick American innocent and Kevin Kline's shady Frenchman. [5 May 1995, p.57]

It never really chills you, but then it never insults you, either, and it's more affecting than you expect any film based on a Stephen King novel to be. [22 Oct 1983]

The story line is not what carries this picture. Pomeranc carries it, with his gentleness, taciturnity and wise eyes. Whether throwing an easy match just to see what will happen if he loses, or looking infinitely sad and worldly as he contemplates the folly of a narrow-focus opponent, Pomeranc makes the linking of a moral intelligence to a chess intelligence the most exhilarating and touching sports combo at the movies this year. [11 Aug 1993, p.29]

For all its shortcomings, Restoration is miles beyond most historical epics. [26 Jan 1996, p.51]

No less than the first film, this new effort is both disarmingly sweet and politically appalling. [13 Apr 1990, p.48p]

I can't imagine anyone not feeling entertained by Happy, Texas.

It's a tossup as to which element of padding is more lifeless - the labored buddy stuff between McCarthy and Silverman, the empty comedy of gangsters Tom Wright and Steve James, or the lame buffoonery of corporate sleuth Barry Bostwick. As long as the calypso beat is on, Bernie staggers ahead, a pepperpot of zombie mirth. [10 July 1993, p.22]

It's slick, but also heartfelt. It's for those who think it's cool to watch "Brady Bunch" reruns and uncool to watch MTV, and it's got terrific performances by Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke and Ben Stiller, who also directs this very appealing canter through the vocational and emotional minefields of our downsizing trash culture. [18 Feb 1994, p.33]

With its beautifully crafted starburst of colors and themes spanning its requisite Victorian gravity, A Little Princess is a beguiling little supernova of a movie I can't imagine anyone not loving. [19 May 1995, p.64]

The Shadow is more a triumph of window-dressing than cinema. It's dress-up, not drama, but it's a pile of style. [01 Jul 1994, p.49]

Ultimately, the kids carry this manipulative tear-jerker. They're warm, lively charmers.

John Patrick Shanley's Joe Versus the Volcano starts out so brilliantly, so hilariously, so imaginatively, that even as it's cracking you up, you begin worrying that the rest of the film can't possibly be that good. Sure enough, it isn't. In fact, it deflates pretty alarmingly. But at least it has that beginning. [9 Mar 1990, p.27]

You'll see worse, but The Dark Half could have been darker. [23 Apr 1993, p.45]

A long, warm, satisfying farewell encounter.

Rich as it looks, it lacks the feverishness of Goya's art.

Souffle-light and airily playful.

Fred Schepisi's "A Cry in the Dark" is a powerful film with a terrific performance by Meryl Streep, her best since "Sophie's Choice." [11 Nov 1988, p.57]

The Baby-Sitters Club is far from an unalloyed success, but it offers more pluses than minuses and is both gentle and instructive. [18 Aug 1995, p.50]

Most bad films are forgettable. They go in one eye and out the other. "North," though, is the kind of disaster that leaves an imprint. Representing a total inability by Rob Reiner to tell a far from sure-fire story about a boy who divorces his parents, it's a "Hudson Hawk" and "Bonfire of the Vanities" for kids. [22 Jul 1994, p.68]

As it is, Behind Enemy Lines will satisfy only those in search of a rousingly, if simplistically, patriotic bloodbath.

The immaculately crafted film that just sits there and refuses to come to life.

Richly compelling.

What sets Tequila Sunrise apart is its layering, its existential dimension. The characters played by Gibson and Russell have been sanded down by a kind of fatalism we normally associate with characters in French gangster movies. There's more than one facet to them. They're entertaining. And urgent. Even when they're just going through routine genre moves, they put laid-back spin on them. [2 Dec 1988, p.29]

Should have been an inaudible man movie. Every time the characters open their mouths, they hammer it deeper into the ground.

As cumbersome as most films in this subgenre, Angelina Jolie makes it watchable.

In Bopha! the usual apartheid-struggle elements never thin out into abstractions. They're elemental, encapsulating a country's tragedy resonantly and powerfully in a single family's. [24 Sept 1993, p.51]

The film works because Depardieu is relaxed enough to turn in persuasive acting that keep us from noticing how plastic the setup is. [4 Feb 1994, p.52]

Has more ambition than the usual serial killer film, but curiously less urgency.

Comically rueful, semi-autobiographical, warmly appealing. [25 Oct 1996, p.C8]

If Return to Me is ultimately too bland and safe, it'll nevertheless serve as a calling card for Hunt's future directorial projects.

In a crisply restored print, it's as joyous as ever. We loved them - yeah, yeah, yeah. Now we can love them all over again.

Figgis's film doesn't match its reach.

Even the valiant mastiff, with his soulful eyes, splayed crocodile teeth and industrial-strength jaws, can't keep "Turner and Hooch" from going to the dogs. Unfortunately, it's the kind of picture any self-respecting dog would toss back. [28 July 1989, p.29]

RoboCop 2 isn't brain-dead, and perhaps that should be enough in this summer of pummeling sequels. But it isn't. Not in an action movie. [22 June 1990, p.43p]

Von Trier's The Idiots is both lively and juvenile.

There's an engagingly homegrown quality to much of the footage.

It's riveting moviemaking and a boost for what's left of America's ailing collective life. [20 Dec 1991]

May not be deep, but it certainly is lip-smacking.

But then Being John Malkovich is a brilliant juggling act, too, brilliantly brought off.

Ingeniously rising above the ongoing culture war between France and the United States, Jacques Audiard's A Self-Made Hero piquantly offers a distinct subtext for each country. [3 Oct 1997, p.D7]

It's often corny, but it's never boring, and it'll sweep you up in its momentum if you give it a chance.

To call Johnny Mnemonic a disaster would be giving it too much credit. Disasters land loudly, resoundingly. This one lands with a dull thud. [26 May 1995, p.87]

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

He's (Willard) a one-man storm of escalating inanity, and he's hilarious.

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

The film is more interesting as a phenomenon than as a movie. [27 Feb 1981]

[The novel's] themes have never not been fresh and they gleam here under the sympathetic and enlivening touch of Armstrong and her cast, who move through the events with sunny assurance and complete immersion in character. [21 Dec 1994]

Scrooged is that rarest of contemporary Hollywood phenomena -- a Christmas movie with Christmas spirit. [23 Nov 1988, p.21]

There are times when "Star Trek V" seems padded and low-impact, but there are things to like, too. [9 June 1989, p.81]

More outrageousness, less sentimentality and eagerness to please would have been welcome. But while The Ref isn't falling-out-of-your-seat funny, it uncorks a steady supply of laughs. It's a throwback to those Disney movies of the '80s that used to star Bette Midler. And it strikes a blow against forced holiday jollity. [11 Mar 1994, p.67]

Just Cause is a textbook example of one rewrite too many. [17 Feb 1995, p.38]

This one is hollow and caves in on itself, growing wearisome and posed, ending in a burst of salvational violence and a coda of sentimentality masquerading as transcendent toughness. [13 Jan 1995]

It's not a perfect film. In fact, it's in many ways a messy film. But if it's disjointed, so are its characters' lives. And they're put onscreen with a veracity and an emotional authenticity that draw you into their tight little barnyard world. [17 Jul 1992, p.31]

It's not only the flattest film in which Williams has appeared; it's also the most anemic Levinson has directed. [18 Dec 1992, p.47]

Can't outrun its very visible limits.

There's talent on view in Renegades, even if it's mostly subordinated to formula and marketing imperatives. [02 Jun 1989, p.33]

Heart and Souls is a sweet but wispy little comedy of ectoplasm that doesn't give its engaging stars quite enough to do. After a while, you're grateful for the special effects that let the film's quartet of suspended souls fade smoothly in and out while Robert Downey Jr. pretends to let them take turns inhabiting his body. [13 Aug 1993, p.45]

Hell itself is going to hell in Sandler's new comedy.

A heady flow of brilliant stupidity.