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Critics Consensus: Mariel Hemingway has a career-making star turn in this highly physical drama about two Olympic athletes who find each other during competitive training.
Critic Consensus: Mariel Hemingway has a career-making star turn in this highly physical drama about two Olympic athletes who find each other during competitive training.
All Critics (29) | Top Critics (10) | Fresh (21) | Rotten (8) | DVD (3)
The leads are convincingly athletic, the characters well drawn.
[Robert] Towne's direction can be frustrating - at one point Donnelly and Hemingway run up a sand dune for what seems like five minutes - but the result is 50 percent more realistic than the average sports film.
But "Personal Best" only jogs along sometimes: It suffers from fleshing out.
Robert Towne's Personal Best is a flashy, hip and quite fascinating investigation into the arduous process of working out sexual identity in today's narcissistic society and culture.
Personal Best is likable precisely because it is so unembarrassed.
Towne has a love of slow motion that's employed as if he's afraid you might miss one, rippling muscle. Worse than that, when people aren't exercising, they are often talking about exercising.
Producer-director-screenwriter Robert Towne has fallen dismally short of his own personal best.
The camerawork is occasionally fussy and over-reliant on sporting clichés, but this is still subtle, sensual stuff.
Which horrible Eighties haircut to choose? Regardless, you'll be rewarded with some of the most startling and texturally stunning American cinema of that largely barren zone shortly thereafter to be known as the Reagan era. Score!
Personal Best has a quality rare in movies now: ambition worn lightly. This looks like a small, simple movie, but it's hardly modest.
[VIDEO] Although screenwriter Robert Towne's directorial debut fell largely on deaf ears when it was released in 1982 "Personal Best" remains a powerful examination of high-stakes female athletes during the late '70s...
Endowed with remarkable performances, superb photography, and a clear vision of what matters to its characters, Personal Best is an underappreciated gem in a genre full of filler.
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