By the end, the accumulated weight and lethargy of the production fails to invest Sophie's fate with the significance Styron achieves.
1 Comment
06/24/06
Sophie's Choice (1982)
81
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:26
Fresh:21
Rotten:5
Average Rating:7.1/10
Runtime: 2 hrs 30 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: The film follows Stingo, an aspiring young writer who moves to New York just post-WWII to a Brooklyn boarding house where he becomes friends with Nathan Landau (Kevin Kline), a Jewish research... [More]
Starring: Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Peter MacNicol, Rita Karin
Director: Alan J. Pakula
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Reviews for Sophie's Choice
Meryl Streep's role in this film is so overwhelming that she outshines everything else.
01/01/00
A suffocating 151 minutes long, with a healthy portion of that running time devoted to a hunk of Holocausploitation of the most crass and cynical variety. And that's the good part.
11/05/09
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.
01/10/03
So perfectly cast and well-imagined that it just takes over and happens to you. It's quite an experience.
10/23/04
Top CriticThe 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.
06/26/07
Top CriticThe 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.
12/10/07
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.
08/30/04
Top CriticThis is the way stories are supposed to be told to us sitting out there in the dark theater.
01/01/00
Astoundingly tedious.
06/26/07
Top CriticA substantial movie, and one serious film watchers won't want to miss.
01/01/00
Competently directed by Pakula and [features] gorgeous cinematography by Almendros.
06/26/07
Literary adaptations rarely come more intelligent than this. A beautiful, haunting masterpiece from start to finish.
05/24/03
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04/30/09
Top CriticStunning to the max, and Streep is memorable as Sophie.
03/02/08
Heartbreakingly lovely performances.
07/20/03
Wildly depressing.
10/28/02
"Streep's magnetic, shattering performance haunts the memory"
07/29/02
No review available.
05/26/03
No review available.
09/05/03
Latest News for Sophie's Choice
June 22, 2007:
AFI Announces Top 100 Movies of All Time ... Again
Ten years ago the AFI gave us a list of the Top 100 American Films Ever Made -- and when that was done they churned out 15 other lists every few years. And then last night they... More...
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