Avis Metacritic

Sexy and soulful like the smoothest slow jam, writer-director Theodore Witcher's debut feature is a classy, surprisingly accomplished romantic comedy focusing on life and love among of a group of young African-American Chicagoans.

Many love stories contrive to get their characters together at the end. This one contrives, not to keep them apart, but to bring them to a bittersweet awareness that is above simple love. Some audience members would probably prefer a romantic embrace in the sunset, as the music swells. But "Love Jones'' is too smart for that.

Anyone who enjoys well-executed romances will find a lot to like about this film, but it lacks the strength of originality evident in those movies that inhabit the genre's top echelon.

There is a point of view here, a rather strong one. It may sound like slight praise, but Love Jones is a movie that is exactly what it wants to be, and that's an achievement in a homogenized, test-marketed vanilla-movie landscape.

It's funky and funny, not just sleek, riding witty repartee that makes it seem an extension of the fizzy, romantic comedies of the '30s (as well as the Harlem Renaissance, invoked by its poetry club scenes). [14 Mar 1977, p.C1]

Slinky, sexy Love Jones brings new life to an old story: a courtship and all its predictable detours on the road to romance, with a boy-meets-girl inexorability along the way to love.

Although it becomes a bit contrived and conventional toward the end, writer-director Theodore Witcher's debut feature shows quite a few good moves, and Larenz Tate and Nia Long make an attractively hot couple at its center.

Still, even when the plot sags, the erotic moodiness of Love Jones remains fresh.

Tate -- whose credits include Menace II Society, The Inkwell and Dead Presidents -- simply hasn’t developed the mature screen sex appeal to carry off this romantic lead.

What this film desperately needed was another element in the script, something besides love and sex. Maybe something about art, something that put the lovers on the same team and back into those appealing bohemian clubs. As it stands, love jones is a smart setting in search of a story.