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90Under the thoughtful direction of Guy Ferland - what emerges is solid and affecting.
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88A heartfelt sleeper from screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and director Guy Ferland.
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80While the elements in this coming-of-age saga may seem familiar, Eszterhas brings a fresh, immigrant's-eye perspective to his tale.
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75I liked this movie a lot - not just for Bacon and Renfro, but also for the work of the wonderfully-named Calista Flockhart, as the girl who dates Karchy.
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75Director Guy Ferland, who has made one previous feature, handles this material smoothly and well, aided by the juke-box bright colors caught by cinematographer Reynaldo Villalobos. And Eszterhas, who has never shown much flair for comedy - except for the mother lode of unintentional laughs in "Showgirls" - puts humor into this story of surprising warmth and bite. [24 Oct 1997]
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75It's a career high mark for Bacon, whose flashy smirk and stifled grimaces flesh out a character both scary and pathetic in this intimate, nostalgic film that delves into the art of the hustle.
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75It's a surprisingly sweet underdog immigrant coming-of-age story set in 1961. [24 Oct 1997]
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70The film is also strengthened by a pair of adroit lead performances by Brad Renfro and Kevin Bacon, actors who completely understand their characters and know how to make the most of them on screen.
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70The movie is loaded with heart and the feel for local color and period detail that can only come out of a personal reminiscence.
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67With help from talented young director Ferland and a sublime performance from Kevin Bacon, Eszterhas has created a gentle and affecting ode to universal growing-up conflicts within a beautifully rendered evocation of a specific time and place.
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63The cliches are all here.... Eszterhas works around these scripting difficulties deftly enough, but the real pleasure here is in watching Bacon and Renfro as idol and adorer.
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63It's a sincere-yet-uninspired diversion, and not even two strong performances can elevate it to a higher level.
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63It's your standard coming-of-age tune set to a top-40 beat. [24 Oct 1997]
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60A carefully evoked and unhurried number that won't bring the house down, this nonetheless ends up being more absorbing than you'd think.
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60Unswervingly sincere and dramatic without surprise or revelation, screenwriter Joe Eszterhas' longtime pet project may be personal, but it offers little to audiences that hasn't been served up in quantity in the past.
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58Kevin Bacon's passionate, sharply drawn portrayal of Billy Magic, a slick, finger-snapping, payola-pocketing disc jockey in early 1960s Cleveland, is the best thing about this conventional but heartfelt semiautobiographical coming-of-age story
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50Even with the good performances, the paces are just agonizingly familiar. [24 Oct 1997]
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50Joe Eszterhas's screenplay is vastly more thoughtful than his scripts for "Basic Instinct" and its ilk, but the storytelling is too spotty for the movie to become the effective moral tale it might have been.
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40Guy Ferland directs with close attention to surface detail, but he never gets to the heart of the story - quite possibly because there isn't one to begin with. [21 Oct 1997]
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Telling Lies in America may not be terrible. But it flickers inconclusively between ordinary and not-so-good. [24 Oct 1997]