Metacritic Film

Map of the World, A

Starring Sigourney Weaver, Julianne Moore, David Strathairn, Dara Perlmutter, Arliss Howard, Kayla Perlmutter, Deborah Lobban, and Chloƫ Sevigny

MPAA RATING: R for some sexuality and language

First Look Pictures Releasing
Drama
125 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters December 3, 1999

A woman (Weaver) lives with her husband and two daughters on a dairy farm in a small Wisconsin community. After an accident on her property involving a friend's (Moore) child, the town turns against her.

WRITTEN BY
Jane Hamilton (novel)
Peter Hedges
Polly Platt

DIRECTED BY
Scott Elliott

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

65 / 100

Critic Reviews

100 San Francisco Chronicle
Sigourney Weaver is so daring and amazing, her veracity is at times painful to behold.
90 Los Angeles Times
An accomplished film that continually takes us beyond our first impressions of people and situations.
88 Chicago Sun-Times
The movie is not tidy. Like its heroine, it doesn't follow the rules.
83 Portland Oregonian
The two lead actresses are exquisite in their divergent ways.
80 Film.com
It's provocative and very moving, filled with some of the strongest performances of the year.
78 Mr. Showbiz
Worth navigating for its refusal to play to the crowd. There's certainly nothing safe or sweet about Weaver's performance.
78 Austin Chronicle
One of the truest-seeming movies I've seen in some time and as one of the most odd and haunting.
75 New York Post
All of the characters in this story of love, guilt and redemption feel like real people, facing real dilemmas, and you truly care about what happens to them
75 Boston Globe
Gives three first-rate actors a chance to stretch, and they do.
75 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
What makes this film truly chilling is the fact first-time feature filmmaker Scott Elliott and his writers somehow make every step of this descent harrowingly believable.
75 Christian Science Monitor
Weaver is superb in a movie as scary and provocative as the timely subject it explores.
70 Dallas Observer
Sigourney Weaver and Julianne Moore share their pain in a depressing World.
70 LA Weekly
If director Scott Elliott falters, it's only in the spots where he tries to comment on her (Alice's) persecution without being complicit in it.
67 Entertainment Weekly
Director Scott Elliott, in his feature-film debut, is especially perceptive about what goes on at the edges during deepening family crises, literally at the borders of the screen.
65 TNT RoughCut Don Kaye
Weaver herself inhabits her character with confidence and passion, although she's inconsistent in spots.
63 USA Today
The movie Weaver has to carry has so many nagging imperfections that Academy Award attention looks like a long shot.
63 New York Daily News
If it's not one of the five best of 1999, it's a personal best for Weaver, and that's pretty good.
60 The New York Times Staff
Something disturbing has happened to this story en route to the screen.
60 Chicago Reader
This eerily dry drama bravely attempts to show, without resorting to the literal staging of contradictory scenarios, how much perceptions of the same situation can vary.
60 Film.com
There's not a single moment when you forget it's Weaver; she always seems to be inhabiting this poor character's soul for her own purposes.
60 Slate
Occasionally dissonant, but it's remarkably cleareyed.
50 TV Guide
All the right intentions but never overcomes the essential problem of showing what's going on inside people's heads.
50 Village Voice
Scott Elliott's palsied directorial debut, from a mine shaft-ridden script, is a sick joke, and Weaver's part in it screams of temporary insanity.
50 San Francisco Examiner
For all the blathering, heavy-handed pathos, we might as well be watching the Lifetime cable channel.
38 Chicago Tribune
Strangely unmoving. So what went wrong?

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