Color Purple, The

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The Color Purple is the year's best film.

Chicago Tribune Gene Siskel

Let's put it this way: To miss this film is to cheat yourself and your family of a memorable moviegoing experience. [20 Dec 1985]

TV Guide Staff (Not Credited)

The film deserves praise for its heartwarming, empowering presentation of the strength and nobility of black women.

Empire Angie Errigo

Unashamedly emotional, it either totally grabs you or leaves you cold.

The New York Times Janet Maslin

Although the combination of his sensibilities and Miss Walker's amounts to a colossal mismatch, Mr. Spielberg's Color Purple manages to have momentum, warmth and staying power all the same.

Variety Staff (Not Credited)

There are some great scenes and great performances in The Color Purple, but it is not a great film.

Los Angeles Times Sheila Benson

For the film's existence alone we can be grateful, and it contains at least three memorable performances, but the transition has been at a harrowing cost to the tone and scale and even the underlying theme of Alice Walker's book. [18 Dec 1985]

Time Richard Corliss

A lavishly illustrated, well-intended, self-inflicted knockoff.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Jay Scott

The film is mystical in tone but peculiarly inexact and weepy in execution - it embodies the apotheosis of pathos. [21 Dec 1985]

Wall Street Journal Julie Salamon

There are many scenes in The Color Purple that are strong and affecting. They do not, however, compensate for the often hackneyed vision of domestic humor, the overreaching for artsiness, the rambling final 20 minutes or so in which Mr. Spielberg subjects us to the sight of hordes of blacks leaving the sinful confines of a jazz club and heading off to church, having already been overcome by a joyous fit of gospel singing. [19 Dec 1985]

Chicago Reader Dave Kehr

A lot of good actors (Danny Glover, Margaret Avery, Adolph Caesar, Rae Dawn Chong) are lost to Spielberg's shallow melodrama; the only one who emerges with any clarity is Oprah Winfrey, perhaps because Spielberg shares her shameless crowd-pleasing instincts.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

In the end, through mawkish direction that includes ludicrous sequences of wild animals in Africa transposed from the novel but made silly by visual literalness, and a completely inappropriate musical number combining a juke joint blues singer with a gospel choir, The Color Purple disintegrates into Steven Spielberg's biggest commercial and artistic failure. [20 Dec 1985]