Jay Cocks
Jay Cocks's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s):
TIME Magazine
Time Magazine film critic.
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) |
Even in the maimed state in which it has been released, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is the richest, most exciting American film so far this year. There are moments and whole sequences here that stand among the best Peckinpah has ever achieved. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Jun 14, 2022
|
|
|
|
Buck and the Preacher (1972) |
Directed by and co-starring Sidney Poitier, it is at least competently made and has a few, fleeting moments of genuine fun. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted May 27, 2022
|
|
|
|
Bronco Bullfrog (1970) |
Crude and defiant, the film is full of such angry energy that its shortcomings can be, if not dismissed, at least indulged. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Apr 08, 2022
|
|
|
|
The Heartbreak Kid (1972) |
This is an eccentrically funny movie, often cutting and poignant at the same time. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Feb 22, 2022
|
|
|
|
Wattstax (1973) |
Stuart uses the music as an expression of common feeling, and he intercuts concert footage with interview material... The result is necessarily superficial, but it does give the people a voice, and the tone is insistent and important. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Dec 18, 2020
|
|
|
|
Emmanuelle (1974) |
There is a great deal of hectic coupling in this film, all of it staged with chintzy tastefulness, as if the participants were being arranged for a department-store window display. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Mar 31, 2020
|
|
|
|
The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe (1972) |
Just about as witty and well-turned as its title. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Mar 18, 2020
|
|
|
|
The Lady in the Car With Glasses and a Gun (1970) |
The movie is one of those carefully jumbled jigsaw puzzles and comes complete with a rushed, not totally satisfactory explanation at the end. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Mar 18, 2020
|
|
|
|
A Star Is Born (1976) |
The trouble with rock 'n' roll in A Star Is Born is that there isn't any. The soundtrack is filled with homogenized harmonics passing for rock, but not a single song is good enough even to be counterfeit. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Mar 06, 2019
|
|
|
|
Diary of Forbidden Dreams (1973) |
Polanski inexplicably uses all the absurdist conventions that he mocked so deftly in Cul de Sac. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Feb 04, 2019
|
|
|
|
Year of the Woman (1973) |
Hochman may be a poet, but her writing here ("In this secret room of mirrors, are we spying on who we are?") offers heavy evidence to the contrary. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Feb 04, 2019
|
|
|
|
The Optimists of Nine Elms (1973) |
The movie has the vacant sentimentality and just the sort of grinding winsomeness that can make family movies such a chore. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Feb 04, 2019
|
|
|
|
The Devils (1971) |
It is like a lunatic opera, an attempt to make a furious poem out of frenzy. Russell's flamboyant theatricality and his interest in the perverse have been too much imposed on his other films; but here, style and subject are perfectly matched. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Nov 08, 2018
|
|
|
|
T.R. Baskin (1971) |
Peter Boyle, as the salesman, and James Caan, as the swine, do the best they can, which is extremely well indeed, but the movie's clumsy feints at sophistication and its grotesque sentimentality prevail. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Oct 13, 2018
|
|
|
|
The Candidate (1972) |
Neither the authentic political atmosphere nor canny performances by Redford, Boyle and Porter go far to cut through the basic glibness of the film. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Jun 29, 2018
|
|
|
|
Murder on the Orient Express (1974) |
The idea is that everything will be more interesting if Sean Connery or Ingrid Bergman, rather than the characters they play, is suspected of having committed the foul deed. The device does not work, despite the [actors'] occasionally droll efforts. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Nov 09, 2017
|
|
|
|
Three Days of the Condor (1975) |
A piece of dotty, slightly paranoid intrigue. Three Days of the Condor promises little and keeps its word. It is hard to get indignant about it, or enthusiastic either. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Aug 09, 2016
|
|
|
|
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) |
Roeg's exuberance and invention are compromised here by a yarn that carries dank traces of Twilight Zone. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Jan 13, 2016
|
|
|
|
The Harder They Come (1972) |
The Harder They Come is always exuberant, and sometimes strong, as casually surprising and effortlessly sinister as the blade sliding out of a gravity knife. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Oct 02, 2015
|
|
|
|
Wanda (1970) |
[Loden] captures the ambiance of small-time roadhouses with compelling accuracy; she manages through some clever location photography to convey an almost overwhelming sense of lingering desperation. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Sep 28, 2015
|
|
|
|
Two Minute Warning (1976) |
There is just enough energy remaining to make Two-Minute Warning an amusing time waster. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Sep 27, 2015
|
|
|
|
Hester Street (1975) |
It is just this short sightedness, this emotional skimpiness, that makes Hester Street a truly "little movie." It is not a matter of size, really, but of depth. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Jul 13, 2015
|
|
|
|
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) |
Sinbad is light, silly fun, and kids will probably appreciate both the skillful technique of the fantasy and the fact that the film makers have had the good sense not to include a single -- yecchh! -- kissing scene. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Mar 24, 2015
|
|
|
|
The Day of the Dolphin (1973) |
What is left, besides a lot of pretty dolphin footage, is some bad intercollegiate-revue satire, a shadow of Sea Hunt, and a calculated sentimentality that evokes memories of Lassie Come Home. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Mar 24, 2015
|
|
|
|
Young Winston (1972) |
Since Young Winston attempts to be a kind of vest-pocket spectacle, there are also a couple of the battles in which he fought (a set-to in the Sudan, a Boer skirmish). Attenborough stages them with all the fury of a grade school recess. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Mar 11, 2015
|
|
|
|
Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1973) |
Zeffirelli's work looks like a Sunday-school coloring book: everything is glowingly photogenic, including poverty, and leprosy. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Mar 11, 2015
|
|
|
|
The Spider's Stratagem (1970) |
[A] mesmeric film. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Aug 29, 2014
|
|
|
|
American Graffiti (1973) |
This superb and singular film catches not only the charm and tribal energy of the teen-age 1950s but also the listlessness and the resignation that underscored it all like an incessant bass line in one of the rock-'n'-roll songs of the period. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Jul 07, 2014
|
|
|
|
The Mother and the Whore (1973) |
The Mother and the Whore is a harrowing psychodrama of destruction. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted May 22, 2014
|
|
|
|
Robin and Marian (1976) |
Robin and Marian is a film that must stand or fall on the strength of its stars. Fortunately, it has two of the best." - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Mar 31, 2014
|
|
|
|
What's Up, Doc? (1972) |
The result is a comedy made by a man who has seen a lot of movies, knows all the mechanics, and has absolutely no sense of humor. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Feb 10, 2014
|
|
|
|
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1973) |
Sentimental without really being tender, naturalistic without being real. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Jan 14, 2014
|
|
|
|
El topo (1971) |
The film is by turns comic and profound, hysterical and pompous, fully complex enough to deserve more than a simple yea or nay. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Nov 15, 2013
|
|
|
|
The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) |
For all its flaws, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid is the kind of first movie so rich in texture and invention that we can look forward to a lot more from Philip Kaufman. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted May 08, 2013
|
|
|
|
Fiddler on the Roof (1971) |
The qualities that have kept the Broadway Fiddler running these seven years are in scant supply onscreen. Gone with barely a trace are warmth, joy, insight and even the most elementary kind of entertainment. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted May 07, 2013
|
|
|
|
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) |
When Cassavetes is really cooking, even the moments that are awkward and forced can become electric. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted May 03, 2013
|
|
|
|
Performance (1970) |
Pop stars continue to have bad luck in films. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Mar 25, 2013
|
|
|
|
Distant Thunder (1973) |
A tragedy of such magnitude becomes an event abstracted by arithmetic. But Ray's artistry alters the scale. His concentrating on just a few victims of the famine causes such massive loss to become real, immediate. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Mar 18, 2013
|
|
|
|
The Great Gatsby (1974) |
The film is faithful to the letter of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel but entirely misses its spirit. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Mar 06, 2013
|
|
|
|
Serpico (1973) |
Wonderful potential, and wasted. Serpico has some brutal surface flash and an acetylene performance by Al Pacino in the title role, but its energy is used to dodge all the questions it should have raised and answered. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Jul 26, 2011
|
|
|
|
Thieves Like Us (1974) |
In many ways, Thieves Like Us is Altman's best work yet, his most stringent and evocative. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted May 23, 2011
|
|
|
|
Solaris (1972) |
The effects are scanty, the drama gloomy, the philosophy of the film thick as a cloud of ozone. The plot is not all that original either. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted May 23, 2011
|
|
|
|
Rio Lobo (1970) |
The Duke knows by instinct what audiences accept without question: whatever he may be called in the script, he is always unmistakably John Wayne. And who would have it any other way? - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted May 23, 2011
|
|
|
|
Farewell, My Lovely (1975) |
Watching this movie has approximately the same effect as being locked overnight in a secondhand clothing store in Pasadena. There is an awful lot of dust and, after a while, the dummies look as if they are moving. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted May 06, 2011
|
|
|
|
The Island at the Top of the World (1974) |
The Arctic looks like a melted dessert, the Viking village like a low-rent neighborhood in Disneyland, and the Vikings themselves like Hell's Angels on Halloween. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Apr 24, 2011
|
|
|
|
Under Milk Wood (1971) |
The images that Director Andrew Sinclair has added to his film adaptation do not complement Thomas' language; they detract from it. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Mar 23, 2011
|
|
|
|
The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1976) |
This is a friendly, no-account movie full of intermittent high spirits. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Mar 21, 2011
|
|
|
|
The Godfather (1972) |
In its blending of new depth with an old genre, it becomes that rarity, a mass entertainment that is also great movie art. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Feb 23, 2011
|
|
|
|
Paper Moon (1973) |
It is very fussy about period detail, and goes to some length to evoke the dim days of Depression America, while just about everything else is left to slide. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Aug 17, 2010
|
|
|
|
The Lords of Flatbush (1974) |
The movie is adept at portraying aimlessness, getting at the greasy anomie that was so much a part of that time. But there is a lack of ambition, as if no one involved in creating the film wanted to cut deeper than a little double-edged nostalgia. - TIME Magazine
Read More
| Posted Jul 25, 2010
|