Sophie's Choice (1982)
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Peter MacNicol, Rita Karin
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Reviews
The movie is too Hollywood in look and feel--it's garish and overwrought--and the flashback and narration are too conventional, and yet the image of the sickly and pale Meryl Streep recollecting her ordeal lingers in memory long after the film is over.
Competently directed by Pakula and [features] gorgeous cinematography by Almendros.
The picture is completely devoid of cinematic interest, adopting instead a tiresome theatrical aesthetic in which showy monologues are filmed in interminable, usually ill-chosen long takes.
By the end, the accumulated weight and lethargy of the production fails to invest Sophie's fate with the significance Styron achieves.
So perfectly cast and well-imagined that it just takes over and happens to you. It's quite an experience.
Though it's far from a flawless movie, Sophie's Choice is a unified and deeply affecting one. Thanks in large part to Miss Streep's bravura performance, it's a film that casts a powerful, uninterrupted spell.
Literary adaptations rarely come more intelligent than this. A beautiful, haunting masterpiece from start to finish.
Incorporates one woman's narrative of surviving the Holocaust into a larger, crushingly banal story of a young, Southern writer's coming of age in the big city of New York.
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