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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    • 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)
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Jay Scott
    Child's Play 2
    His first visit was bad, this is worse. [09 Nov 1990]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Scott
    Delicatessen
    Delicatessen is a carniverous sausage - lots of fat, a few meaty bits. [10 Apr 1992]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Scott
    Knightriders
    Because it attempts so much more than Excalibur, the disappointment of Knightriders cuts deeper. Romero wants to tell the tale, to comment on it and to relate it to the present; he wants to bring contemporary satirical life to the myth, a service he performed cannily for the Dracula legend in Martin. [18 April 1981]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Scott
    The Outsiders
    This is an honestly moving, ungainly film. [25 Mar 1983]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Raiders of the Lost Ark
    Raiders of the Lost Ark (at the Eglinton) is a cinematic roller-coaster, thrilling and frightening in equal measure, a heart-pounding slide down greased lightning. [12 June 1981]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    The Great Mouse Detective
    Disney unleashes a mousey minor masterpiece. [02 July 1986, p.C5]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 51 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Scott
    Youngblood
    The ending can be read as conclusively upbeat or as corrosively ironic. Still, Youngblood is never less than fascinating, and it's a bit like the game it explores: the times you don't want to look at it are the times you can't look away. [31 Jan 1986, p.D1]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Scott
    Goin' South
    Neither Nicholson nor the talented Miss Steenburgen, in her film debut, could rise above the patched-together script. The promising parody of anti-mythic Westerns, and of mellerdrammers (the railroad wants to snitch Julia's land), decays into a love story whose parameters are all too narrow and all too familiar. [07 Oct 1978]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 78 Metascore
    • 38 Jay Scott
    House of Games
    House of Games is so bad it seems reasonable to conclude that God was out of town and Mamet's muse was in a coma. [16 Oct 1987]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Scott
    Sophie's Choice
    The film is a respectable, claustrophobic and slick piece of work, and cinematographer Nestor Almendros' color strategies - Rembrandt-like light at night, lemony tones during the day, desaturated sepia at Auschwitz - are arty to a fault. [14 Dec 1982]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Jay Scott
    2010
    Sadly, 2010 is not going to make it any easier for the uninitiated to grasp the reasons its predecessor thrilled a generation: the only people 2010 is likely to thrill are the agents of the actors in the cast. [7 Dec 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Scott
    Empire of the Sun
    Although Tom Stoppard's script lifts Ballard's spare dialogue directly from the page, the context in which it is placed is kitsch. [11 Dec 1987]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Scott
    The Princess Bride
    Rob Reiner's not up to it: when the movie is meant to be romantic, the tone is frequently mushy and sexless, and when it's meant to be anachronistic and satiric, it's vaudeville-vulgar.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Scott
    Victory
    Victory, the new film by 74-year-old John Huston, is a civilized, professional, old-fashioned entertainment about men in groups. The picture is being hyped as a story of human spirit, prevailing against impossible odds, but it's a lot more low-key and a great deal more enjoyable than that. It's the story of the wake left by a great director sailing smoothly at half-mast. [31 July 1981]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 47 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Scott
    Young Guns II
    There is a dearth of novelty in Young Guns II, but screenwriter Fusco proceeds as if the material were not familiar and seems to be having a hell of a time exposing it to an audience of teen-agers who wouldn't know John Ford from Ford Fairlane. [03 Aug 1990]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Scott
    Ruthless People
    Ruthless People is a farce rather than a satire and it's far less ambivalent toward the behavior it depicts than All in the Family was - it actively encourages the audience to tee-hee over people being horrible to each other. Dale Launer's script is often extremely funny, especially when Midler is around, but it's an extended sick joke that doesn't realize it's got a disease. [27 June 1986, p.D1]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Scott
    Clue
    If you see Clue only once, and it's hard to imagine seeing it more than once, even for the five different minutes, the "A" is by far the best, featuring as it does (this does not give away the identity of the murderer) a splendidly funny shtick from Madeline Kahn. [13 Dec 1985, p.D5]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Scott
    The Pope of Greenwich Village
    With its close attention to the Little Italy milieu and its farcical treatment of a safecracking, the picture is designed to turn Martin Scorsese's scathing Mean Streets into a sitcom. It could be done, and done well, in the right hands, but those hands do not belong to the calloused paws of the pugilistically inclined director Stuart Rosenberg. [22 June 1984]
    • 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)
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Broadway Danny Rose
    Splendidly viewed through Gordon Willis' gleaming black and white cinematography, the story of Danny Rose, narrated by a group of aged comics reminiscing at the Carnegie Deli, becomes a bittersweet examination of dreams that don't come true. [27 Jan 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Scott
    Brubaker
    David Keith, a native of Tennessee, had a tiny role in The Rose (as Bette Midler's soldier friend) and he is one of the few in the Brubaker cast whose accent is authentic and who appears to have the wherewithal to survive in a penitentiary. His scenes are the only respite from the movie's shrill, simplistic self-congratulation. [21 June 1980]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 56 Metascore
    • 88 Jay Scott
    Pretty in Pink
    The movie made me so happy, and here I am back on the subway with Nerdo, and there's this jerk across the aisle who's like ancient, 30 at least, and he's got the nerve to look right into my see-through Madonna lace outfit. And he winks. Oh, barf- ola.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 12 Jay Scott
    The Black Hole
    The Black Hole isn't mediocre or even bad - it's dreadful...[It] looks, sounds and feels like a careless, cynically manufactured B-movie. Uncle Walt must be spinning in his cyrogenic vault. [24 Dec 1979]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 41 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Scott
    Hellbound: Hellraiser II
    Clive Barker is not without a sense of humor. And he's certainly not without a sense of what will scare his audiences senseless. [28 Dec 1988]
    • 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)
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Scott
    High Hopes
    In High Hopes, Leigh regularly expresses love for the very people to whom he is putting the boot... As a satire, High Hopes is an esthetic joy. [14 April 1989]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 44 Metascore
    • 63 Jay Scott
    Raw Deal
    Both Cobra and Raw Deal are designed primarily to get the audience off on violence, and both are successful; what makes Raw Deal marginally preferable is not only the bizarre charm of its star, but the fact that the filmmakers are honest about what they're up to and do not unduly exploit the hostility of the audience.
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Jay Scott
    No Way Out
    Timeliness aside, it's an electrifying and erotic film-noir thriller in the Hitchcock tradition - James Stewart could have been cast as Tom Farrell - right up to the final five minutes, which feature a surprise ending that is a shock primarily because it makes little logical sense; surprise endings should click satisfyingly into place once the shock has worn off, but this one stirs up questions that refuse to settle. [14 Aug 1987]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 59 Metascore
    • 38 Jay Scott
    The Black Cauldron
    In the end the taste of the brew is inferior to the bouquet, and while it's true that the cauldron is a splendiferous container, the dregs at the bottom are bitter. How 12 years and $25- million could be lavished on a movie with narrative holes big enough to swallow the film's major creation, a prophetic pig, is a conundrum that must have Uncle Walt spinning in his cryogenic crypt: this is a movie that knows how to do everything but tell a story. [26 July 1985]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
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