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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    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    The Black Stallion
    The relationship between man and beast develops slowly and mystically - the island interlude, utterly without dialogue, lasts 50 minutes, and is one of the most sustained, lyrical, rapturous sequences in the history of motion pictures, a visual symphony whose beauty cannot be oversold. [15 Mar 1980]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 57 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Cujo
    Is it possible for a horror movie to be too good? If it is, then Cujo is it: this is one of the few films on record where the combination of low shock and high style results in an experience that borders on the unbearably intense. The movie is spectacularly well-made, but it's nearly unwatchable. [29 Aug 1983]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Full Metal Jacket
    May be the best war movie ever made...Different is Kubrick's artistry and control, and his almost perverse, but philosophically progressive, refusal to impart to chaos a coherent narrative contour.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Kramer vs. Kramer
    Kramer vs. Kramer is one of the most sensitive and least judgmental film about relationships ever made in the United States.... One of the important films. [15 Dec 1979]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Missing
    Missing, which should easily turn out to be one of the year's best films, is essentially the taut, moving story of three people, two countries and one institution. [13 Feb 1982]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 67 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
    Sammy and Rosie is not only the best British film of the year, it's one of the best films of the year from any country, period, a raucously erotic dirge belted into the gaping mouth of a tomb. [30 Oct 1987]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Distant Voices, Still Lives
    An idiosyncratic masterpiece and one of the few films in history that gloriously earns the appellation Proustian. [25 Sep 1989]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    The Stunt Man
    The Stunt Man, which is scary and sorrowful and stirring and sexy - in other words, everything a big Hollywood popcorn-cruncher of a movie should be - is the best movie about making a movie ever made. [11 Oct 1980]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Terms of Endearment
    Terms of Endearment is the rare commercial picture that sets audiences to laughing hysterically and crying unashamedly, sometimes within consecutive seconds, and then shoos them out of the theatre in contented emotional exhaustion. [23 Nov 1983]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Quest for Fire
    The title is a tease: Quest For Fire is the quest for understanding, the quest for an answer, the quest for The Answer. Quest For Fire maintains that in the space of 80,000 years we have walked a long, long way, and have come scarcely any distance at all. [12 Feb 1982]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Goodfellas
    No so-called serious gangster film has ever been more fun, or less dangerous, or more intrinsically feminist, than GoodFellas. Even "I Married the Mob" was scarier.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Cinema Paradiso
    Cinema Paradiso converts you to the credo that art can indeed be holy.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Like Water for Chocolate
    Overtly passionate, ebulliently funny and ideologically subtle, Like Water for Chocolate is strong drink - hot and sweet. It toasts life not as it is but as it should be. [09 Apr 1993]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    After Dark, My Sweet
    This is a miniature classic, a pulp tragedy. [29 Sep 1990]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Breaking Away
    One of the best, funniest, most surprising and likeable American films of the year. [27 Aug 1979]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Dead Ringers
    David Cronenberg's gelid masterpiece.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Prince of the City
    Divided into five parts, the film is the most ambitious, realistic, thorough and scrupulous feature yet released by a major studio on the subject of cops and corruption...As portrayed electrifyingly - sometimes a little too electrifyingly - by Williams, Ciello's reasons for becoming a stoolie are as complex as his reasons for becoming a cop. [29 Aug 1981]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Miami Blues
    MIAMI BLUES gleefully presides over the happy marriage of two solid but usually separate traditions in U.S. movies: film noir, with its emphasis on the sleazy and the powerless, and screwball comedy, with its celebration of the romantically eccentric. As darkly unpredictable as The Third Man and as bouncingly comic as Pretty Woman, Miami Blues deserves all the rave reviews it's going to get and all the tons of money it's going to make. [20 Apr 1990]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    The Manchurian Candidate
    This is an oddball classic that leaves you weak with pleasure. [11 Mar 1988]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    A Fish Called Wanda
    May be less than the sum of its parts, but its parts are more impressive than most other wholes around.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Time Bandits
    Time Bandits is the best children's picture since The Black Stallion, but it is a satiric, inventive, fantastical vacation for the filmgoer of any age: imagine an intelligent Raiders of the Lost Ark with a deeply bitchy sense of humor. [06 Nov 1981]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Superman
    Estimates of the movie's costs range between $35-and $70-million; whatever the price, it was not too much to pay. As gods go, Superman is one of the godliest; his movie is one of the best.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Norma Rae
    This is Sally Field's movie. Her performance - hyperbole completely aside - is peerless, one of the major achievements by an actress in the movies of any place and of any time. Reuben tells Norma Rae that when he wants a smart, loud, profane, sloppy, hardworking woman he'll call on her. From now on, when directors want legerdemain that becomes art, they're going to call on Sally Field.[10 Mar 1979]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Halloween
    This low-budget horror film, sophisticated far beyond its budget, is the work of John Carpenter, an authentic prodigy whose style recalls both Martin Scorsese and the Brian De Palma of "Carrie," but who has a metaphysical, sophomoric sense of humor both of those directors lack.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
    Beyond Thunderdome is a masterfully directed fantasy, convincing down to the smallest detail in its vision of an alternate existence, and it has gone beyond the relentless sadomasochism of The Road Warrior; Max has now taken up with children, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is suitable for them. [9 July 1985]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
    Can a film that raises more questions about its subject than it answers be considered a masterpiece? If it can, that film is Paul Schrader's innovative cinematic biography of the Japanese novelist, essayist and actor Yukio Mishima, the man who in 1970 committed public seppuku (hara-kiri) in an unprecedented, grandiloquent attempt to turn his life into art. [12 Sep 1985]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 70 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    About Last Night...
    One of the most interesting, one of the most rewarding and one of the funniest films of the year. [4 July 1986]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Edward Scissorhands
    A classic... Edward Scissorhands is a sharp salute to the oddball in all of us.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Miller's Crossing
    A masterpiece, but of a unique kind... A gorgeously filmed, supremely well-acted, intricately written film noir about now.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Scott
    Apocalypse Now
    Movies have always been - at their most extravagantly appealing, sensually exciting and rationally disturbing-pieces of art with the power to bypass our defences. A few times in the history of movies, one caught glimpses of a power that could turn the screen experience into a hallucinatory celebration of irrationality, of pure feeling, and even, perhaps, of insanity. Apocalypse Now goes further in that direction more successfully than any movie ever has. [21 May 1979]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
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