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
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Anywhere But Here
    Aims its big, bold mother-daughter conflicts straight at the heart by way of the tear ducts, and connects.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Truly Madly Deeply
    There's enchanting delicacy and irresistible quirkiness in Anthony Minghella's allegory of grief. And humane comedy, too, in this fable about a woman flattened by inconsolable loss, then rejoining the world. [24 May 1991]
    • Boston Globe
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Carr
    White Hunter Black Heart
    The sad thing about Clint Eastwood's White Hunter, Black Heart is that it fails in every important respect, yet is in no way cheap or exploitative. [20 Sep 1990, p.81p]
    • Boston Globe
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    Titan A.E.
    A space shot worth taking.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Carr
    Hoop Dreams
    Hoop Dreams is without peer among sports-oriented documentaries to the extent that it's about people before it's about athletic feats. It respects its subjects' complexity and tenacity while nailing the problematic, double-edged influence of sports in America. In fact, no film has ever combined sports and family values as powerfully as Hoop Dreams. There's simply nothing like it. [21 Oct 1994, p.47]
    • Boston Globe
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    The Golden Bowl
    What Merchant, Ivory and Co. arrive at is a sort of handsomely illustrated Cliffs Notes version of the novel.
    • Boston Globe
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    Quills
    A witty yet fiery and, in the best sense, provocative play of ideas about freedom of expression.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    Double Jeopardy
    Judd is pretty much on her own - an assignment she mostly can handle with aplomb.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Lorenzo's Oil
    In short, the film removes any possible shred of gloss or glamorization of the situation. It's gritty, honest and admirable. Sarandon is perfect as the combative mother. You can't take your eyes off her. And Nolte eventually is touching as the dogged father determined to find a cure in the Library of Congress. [15 Jan 1993, p.45]
    • Boston Globe
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Spy Game
    There's something elegiac in Redford's spy who knows he's a dinosaur but still has a few moves left.
    • Boston Globe
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    L.I.E.
    Superior and original filmmaking. You won't be able to take your eyes off it.
    • Boston Globe
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    The General
    The General is a gravely beautiful film (in wide-screen black and white) by John Boorman about an Irish career criminal who was an antiauthoritarian folk hero, a warm family man to a menage a trois, and also a dangerous psychopath.
    • Boston Globe
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    The Legend of 1900
    Its protagonist haven't enough emotional substance to carry them through the long, darkly lit introspective sequences.
    • Boston Globe
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    O
    The film collapses under the weight of the effort to shoehorn Shakespeare's story into a context that ultimately doesn't accommodate it.
    • Boston Globe
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Go
    "Pulp Fiction" wannabes don't get much slicker or edgier than Go.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Career Girls
    Career Girls is a film that knows how wounding and complicated life can be, yet still believes in, and convincingly renders, the healing power of friendship. [15 Aug. 1997, p.D4]
    • Boston Globe
    • 14 Metascore
    • 38 Jay Carr
    Rollerball
    Meretricious without being entertaining, it's an easy game -- and an easier film -- to sit out.
    • Boston Globe
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Carr
    Eat Drink Man Woman
    Lee's light hand with his timeless subjects deftly, affectingly, ruefully and hilariously covers all the bases. [19 Aug 1994, p.49]
    • Boston Globe
    • 40 Metascore
    • 38 Jay Carr
    The Invisible Circus
    A fatally insubstantial film.
    • Boston Globe
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Carr
    Night of the Living Dead
    Particularly because Savini obviously feels a responsibility to the original, it's impossible for this new film to unfold with any sense of discovery or surprise. It's almost all just at the level of dutiful replication. [19 Oct 1990, p.35]
    • Boston Globe
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    So I Married an Axe Murderer
    The buzz was negative on So I Married an Axe Murderer, but the buzz was wrong. Mike Myers' new comedy isn't quite as fresh and bubbly and goofy as "Wayne's World," but it's hip, lively fun, with only a slight bit of sag. [30 July 1993, p.29]
    • Boston Globe
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Jay Carr
    Gone in Sixty Seconds
    The flat tire of summer movies.
    • Boston Globe
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Running on Empty
    At first glance, Running on Empty seems a humane, if rickety, left-wing tearjerker, with strong acting propping up a weak script. It takes a second glance to get at what's really interesting about the film - its subtext. [30 Sep 1988, p.33]
    • Boston Globe
    • 47 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Carr
    The Shipping News
    The Shipping News is good news, but not as good as it could have been.
    • Boston Globe
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Late August, Early September
    Assayas and his engaged, responsive cast finally beat the odds, subtly and beautifully enabling the film to genuinely seem to be about a handful of friends approaching - not always easily or even gracefully but ultimately very touchingly - the September of their shared and individual lives. [13 Aug 1999, p.D4]
    • Boston Globe
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Carr
    Talk Radio
    Neither the film nor the play has figured out where to go with Barry Champlain once it plants him at the center of his can-of-worms microcosm. We're never bored by his whiplash flailings, but on screen, as on stage, we can't help asking ourselves to what end they're being deployed. [13 Jan 1989, p.46]
    • Boston Globe
    • 16 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Carr
    Harlem Nights
    The best thing about the film is the way it allows Richard Pryor to rise above the demeaning buffoon roles he's been playing for the last few years and finally play a character with dignity and style. [17 Nov 1989, p.89]
    • Boston Globe
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    The Brady Bunch Movie
    The genius - and there is a cockeyed genius permeating "The Brady Bunch" - is that it nails the entrapment and anxiety beneath the happy faces as unmistakably as the films of Douglas Sirk did the decade before. [17 Feb 1995, p.41]
    • Boston Globe
    • 52 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
    There's nothing major here, certainly nothing on the order of my favorite among Allen's retro workouts of the past decade, ''Bullets Over Broadway.'' But it's entertaining all the same.
    • Boston Globe
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Carr
    Hard Target
    It's a spectacular ballet of death, lavishing upon us the highest body count of any action movie since "Total Recall," and its cynical panache marks a return to form for kickboxer Jean-Claude Van Damme, whose recent vehicles have sputtered. Not "Hard Target," though, which floors it from start to finish as it sends Van Damme after a vicious gang that rounds up homeless vets to serve as sacrificial victims for rich hunters in New Orleans. [20 Aug 1993, p.43]
    • Boston Globe
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