Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael

Best of all is Winona Ryder, who gets to play a brilliant teenager, as she did in ''Heathers.'' It's almost automatically comical to hear such a clear, emphatic and intelligent voice coming out of a kid. But Ryder also works that oddness for dramatic advantage, creating with Dinky the sense of a great spirit temporarily stuck in a child's body. [12 Oct 1990, p.E3]

Though ''Roxy Carmichael'' is never as fresh or powerful as it might have been, it is a sweetly engaging film in the Barry Levinson school: just when you think it might fall into a bottomless pit of sentimentality, it stops short. Read full review

An offbeat pic pointlessly oversaturated with grating characters who look like they got lost on their way to a John Waters fan club convention. Read full review

The character played by Ryder is really the centerpiece of the story, and she is the best part of this slight story...The rest of the movie is a fairly standard portrait of small-town life, with characters in more pain than is typical of such films. [12 Oct 1990, p.C]

Winona Ryder, who stars as brooding teen Dinky Bossetti, is the one good thing about ''Roxy.'' She has talent enough to transcend the script: I actually cared about the ending, when Dinky finds out whether Roxy Carmichael is her real mother. If only getting there had been more fun. [18 Oct 1990, p.6E]

Fans of Winona Ryder will definitely want to catch her in an offbeat role as the town rebel in this teen-oriented smalltown saga; unfortunately, the rest of the production doesn't quite match up. Read full review

Where the movie sabotages her, though, is by insisting that all she really wants is to be like everyone else. Read full review

The movie sinks into contrived plot manipulation. Read full review

There are a few piquant ironies at work, but the selling point is Ryder, again doing her coming-of-age turn for the camera, with a performance that wavers between gangling fragility and a tough-girl Matt Dillonism. Otherwise, the movie falls flat, because of its leaden pacing, and because deep down it believes in the moral imperative of having perfect hair and teeth. Read full review

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael is sweet but dumb and clumsily executed, with its central character overdrawn and undermined, and the adults mostly written off as geeks. What the film needs is some of the troublemaking spunkiness Roxy showed when she left town. [12 Oct 1990, p.30p]

The script resembles an especially anemic Afterschool Special. [12 Oct 1990, p.22]

Borderline dreadful waste of potential. Read full review

WELCOME HOME ROXY CARMICHAEL is less a movie than it is an example of what the studios refer to as "product," the kind of toothless comedy that features big stars in frenetic and forgettable farces. Read full review

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael isn't truly terrible, it's truly confused. It's as though director Jim Abrahams wanted to do heartfelt comedy-drama but couldn't quite shake off the wicked edge of his alma mater, ZAZ: Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, the dementos behind "Airplane!" and "The Naked Gun." Read full review

Issues of forced cuteness aside, the recent Pump Up the Volume did the alienated-youth bit more insightfully than this movie does. Pump Up the Volume was savvy enough to have its young hero make statements such as "I say down with all guidance counselors. Make them work for a living." In Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, the troubled teen's confidante is the school's guidance counselor. Read full review

The wrong version of Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael must have been released, because this sloppy-looking film never should have been allowed into theaters. [11 Oct 1990]

If the saccharine quality of movies could be translated into seismic activity, Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael would level Los Angeles. [12 Oct 1990, p.13]

As the movie slowly slogs along to its dreary, moralistic conclusion, Ryder`s sharp presence seems to recede into a candy-colored fog of sentimentality. Read full review

Major surgery has been known to take less time and give more pleasure than this forgettable flick. [13 Oct 1990]