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100Doesn't sanitize its tale of African American loss and survival -- the way Steven Spielberg's “The Color Purple'' did -- but delves deeply, heartbreakingly into an American tragedy.
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90This terrifyingly beautiful movie blends metaphor and stark social commentary to achieve a spontaneous grace.
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89The performances of all the central and secondary characters match the passionate intensity of the film's behind-the-scenes collaborators.
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88The film had a curious effect on me. I was sometimes confused about events as they happened, but all the pieces are there, and the film creates an emotional whole. It's more effective when it's complete than during the unfolding experience.
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88Beloved is for those who want substance from a movie, and don't mind facing uncomfortable truths in the process.
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88Jonathan Demme's potent adaptation of Morrison's novel may be substantial, but it is also engrossing, a movie that plays at times like a combination of “Gone With The Wind” and “The Exorcist.”
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75What is surprising -- remarkable even -- is that Beloved arrives onscreen with a minimum of dull virtue, gagging uplift and slick Hollywood gloss.
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Has a great deal going for it. [16 October 1998, p. 57]
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75Often a cinematic marvel and often the year's most pungent movie medicine, Beloved always feels as if it's carrying the world's weight, and maybe it is. [16 October 1998, p. 7E]
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70Beloved is ungainly and hard to follow at times, like the proverbial giant not quite sure how to best use its strength. But that power exists, present and undeniable, and once this film gets its bearings, the unsentimental fierceness of its vision brushes obstacles and quibbles from its path.
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70Powerful, depressing and very, very long. At close to three hours, it virtually enslaves an audience, which may be part of the point.
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60They've taken material with the power to insinuate itself directly into the realm of the imagination, and made it strangely inert and lifeless.
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58Winfrey's performance is full of stoic anger, and individual moments have ferocity and pull, yet you're always aware of them as moments.
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50Much of the acting is solid, but earnest performances can't give the picture all the bite and excitement it sorely needs.
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50The dramatic payoff is a bit disappointing; the movie is often overwrought; and its sense of its own importance finally wears you down.
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50Though Beloved sags into repetition after two of its three hours, this beautiful movie is suffused with an intensity that holds our attention for the conclusion.
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Beloved tries to be an anthem of the spirit, and that's just about the most difficult--and unfilmable--thing you can attempt in the movies. Demme stretches things out to epic length, but what was really needed here was an epic imagination.
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50Beloved works on its own but is much enhanced by familiarity with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In so ambitiously bringing this story to the screen, Ms. Winfrey underscores a favorite, invaluable credo: read the book.
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50Demme is understandably reluctant to linger on the horrors of slavery, but it's a dramaturgical mistake. The quick, shocking flashbacks of Sethe's brutalization by her white masters don't do the job--they're horrific, but with a B movie luridness.
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40Dutiful as it is, Jonathan Demme's Beloved doesn't succeed so much as it abides…it moves in leisurely fits and--unencumbered by style or narrative complexity--never loses its forward momentum.
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40At nearly three hours, however, it rather overstays its welcome, trying the patience even as it sustains intrigue regarding its final revelations.
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40One of the more high-minded and painful follies of recent years.
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30When the movie isn't hitting us over the head, it's spooning out the material to us like broth to an invalid, drop by flavorless drop. The excruciating pace mirrors the sluggishness of Morrison's sonorous prose.
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20Beloved has an almost gut-wrenching quality to it. But the same can't be said for the movie overall--it's a noble, ambitious failure, but a failure nonetheless.