Jay Scott

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The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
For 482 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 48% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 50% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 5 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Jay Scott's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 The Black Stallion
Lowest review score: 0 Another 48 Hrs.
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 264 out of 482
  2. Mixed: 106 out of 482
  3. Negative: 112 out of 482
482 movie reviews
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    • 58 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    9 to 5
    The gamble of casting Misses Tomlin and Fonda in what would seem to be the wrong roles (Violet is the strong, efficient, hard-edged secretary; Judy the frilly, "feminine," inexperienced employee) pays off handsomely, especially with Miss Tomlin. When she is handed a memo by a senior secretary and smilingly snarls, "Thanks, Roz, I know just where to stick it," her line reading is worth the price of admission. The pneumatic Miss Parton sings the theme song with greater confidence than she brings to her acting: she is a sweet little thing, but she's no thespian. [20 Dec 1980]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 64 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Watership Down
    Rosen has not so much adapted Watership Down as he has intelligently condensed it, and compensated for the simplifications with pleasures books can't provide. [20 Jan 1979]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Tucker: The Man and His Dream
    This happy daydream contains Coppola's most assured work since "Apocalypse Now;" save for its modesty, it is in no way inferior to his masterpiece, "The Godfather" Saga. [12 Aug 1988]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Dances with Wolves
    The treatment of the Sioux is not only sympathetic, it's ethnographically exact. Neither Noble Savages nor Red Injuns, the natives in Dances With Wolves are differentiated human beings about to undergo cultural genocide.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Things Change
    The performances are pristine in their theatricality, Raul Ruiz Anchia's lighting is neo-classical in its velvety richness, and the script (by Mamet and Shel Silverstein) is unfailingly intricate and consistent, for all its flamboyant use of coincidence. But it is the art of Don Ameche's courtly, charismatic characterization that lifts Things Change above the level of a crafty, enjoyable stunt.
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Places in the Heart
    Sweet and relatively simple, a classic episodic melodrama of unabashed tenderness and unapologetic warmth, but it's not sentimental, and its offhanded explication of racism in rural Texas in 1935 is integrated so seamlessly with its dramatization of the widow Spalding's crusade to keep her farm, that the dark undercurrents of the film are easy to overlook.
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 63 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Rumble Fish
    The most amazing thing about this amazing movie may be that in the end it communicates the large uncertainties and small hopes of a twisted, inarticulate adolescent boy perfectly, and wordlessly. [14 Oct 1983]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    One False Move
    If everyone in One False Move keeps making mistakes, there are no false moves from the technicians or actors; the only flaw is the slight taint of convenience that attends the plotting of so many contemporary thrillers. But the taint is superficial - it's eventually overwhelmed by the smell of corruption, the odour of pain, and the stench of hopelessness. [4 Sept 1992]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Prizzi's Honor
    A work of crazed distinction. [14 June 1985]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Dawn of the Dead
    Any culture that can create the kind of self-criticism exemplified in work of the Pittsburgh horror master is far from a lost cause. [29 June 1979]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Escape from Alcatraz
    The major reason for Escape's success is Siegel's effortless expertise in re-creating the atmosphere of Alcatraz, an atmosphere in which, as the Warden says, good citizens were not made, but good prisoners were. As photographed by Bruce Surtees in rainy black and blue, the dogged, slow-motion swim through excelsior that constitutes prison existence is painfully and convincingly reproduced. For Eastwood, there is an extra bonus: if the milieu doesn't provide him with a reason for his stubbornly characteristic grimness, it does at least provide an excuse. [23 June 1979]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 62 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    The Bounty
    The picture is slightly too long, there are some special effects (especially during a storm at sea) that don't come off, and Vangelis's electronic moans on the soundtrack are sporadically anachronistic, but The Bounty is otherwise a spectacularly sustained piece of epic filmmaking. [04 May 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Stranger Than Paradise
    From beginning to end, Jarmusch carries it off. His vision is stranger than paradise, and his talent is odder than hell. [16 Nov 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    The Secret of NIMH
    A bouncy, witty, pleasurably scary children's movie that adults will enjoy more than they may care to confess. [02 July 1982]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 94 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Days of Heaven
    Days of Heaven is so unapologetically beautiful, so calculatingly gorgeous, it is certain to arouse resentment in the minds of those who find visual hedonism a sin in movies, and to arouse suspicion, if not outrage, in those who require that movies have heart. [22 Sept. 1978]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    To Live and Die in L.A.
    To Live and Die in L.A., for all its amorality and downright immorality, is a cracker-jack thriller, tense and exciting and unpredictable, and more grimy fun than any moralist will want it to be. It has big hit written all over it: the premise, Miami Vice Meets The French Connection, may be perverse, but it's also inspired. [1 Nov 1985]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    The Color of Money
    It may be true that in gambling money won is twice as sweet as money earned, but inart, only the earned has savor; The Color of Money earns enough of it to turn most other movies persimmon with esthetic envy. [17 Oct 1986, p. D1]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 63 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Star 80
    Fosse carries the movie to its conclusion steadily and superlatively, with a directness that is devastating and with a depth of insight that ameliorates, if only slightly, the ghastliness of the carefully choreographed images. [10 Nov 1983]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 57 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Ragtime
    Ragtime itself twinkles with delight - perhaps only an immigrant, and a recent one, could have made this film, which looks squarely at the social problems gnawing at North America but which finds, within them and without them, cause for hope. [20 Nov 1981]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Manhattan
    Never before has Allen been able to integrate comedy and pathos as deftly as he does in Manhattan. [28 Apr 1979, p. 17]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 93 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Reversal of Fortune
    Mesmerizing.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    The Postman Always Rings Twice
    More frightening than most horror movies, more erotic than most pornography, The Postman Always Rings Twice (at the Imperial) is a sour slice of bona fide Americana, a relentlessly pessimistic melodrama that conjures memories of They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather and Chinatown. [21 March 1981]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Bull Durham
    A loopy, loving nine innings full of comic curve balls, emotional home-runs and euphoric, summertime music.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Hair
    Hair is entertaining - even fabulously entertaining - because it is so strange, so young, so innocent, so beneficent and adolescent, so lovable and so loving; it is entertaining because it is - all of it is - so impossible, so remote, so inconceivable in any place anywhere outside of a Hollywood musical. [28 Mar 1979]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 57 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Brainstorm
    Except for the ending (more about that in a minute), Brainstorm is near the pinnacle of popular entertainment, just below "WarGames". [30 Sept 1983]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Tootsie
    The year's best man is a lady. [17 Dec 1982]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    River's Edge
    One of the blackest, funniest, most disturbing and annoyingly lingering American films of this or any other year; the annoyance occasioned by the film's tendency to linger is not because River's Edge is not good, it's because it's too good.[05 June 1987]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Midnight Run
    The virtue of Midnight Run is not that it does anything new; the virtue is that it does everything old so well.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Raging Bull
    The intensity of the film verges on the intolerable.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Tess
    The detached tone of Tess - contemplative and fatalistic, resigned and melancholy - may be non-romantic and in the end not entirely true to Hardy, but it is full of love and compassion for those who seek both in a world where there is so little of either. [14 Feb 1981]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
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