Beloved: Critic Reviews

A dense, jangled cataclysm of enigma and outrage.

Moves in leisurely fits and -- unencumbered by style or narrative complexity -- never loses its forward momentum.

After next March, new editions of the book will boast a different kind of label - one that says 'Now an Oscar-winning motion picture.'

There are many strengths, including the cinematography, sound design and a hauntingly allusive score.

I was sometimes confused about events as they happened, but all the pieces are there, and the film creates an emotional whole.

A movie that requires the viewer to meet it halfway. Those willing to make the effort will be rewarded with an exquisitely photographed and intricately layered drama.

It is an urgently intimate epic of the heart, a dramatization of a monumental journey of pain, love and, tentatively, hope that has scorching emotional impact.

Like a great book, Beloved builds up, through accretion of detail, so much information and revelation that we begin to live the lives with these people.

Beloved has power and impressive artistry to spare!

A remarkable movie!

Demme's potent adaptation of Morrison's novel may be substantial, but it is also engrossing.

Everywhere you look in Beloved are signs of Demme's decay as a director -- the inattention to performances, the grindingly slow pacing, the sloppy, at times incoherent, story line and the straining grandiloquence of the tone.

A powerful and disturbing motion picture!

A knot of fierce emotions that is left for the viewer to untangle. Make the effort.

Once this film gets its bearings, the unsentimental fierceness of its vision brushes obstacles and quibbles from its path.

Okay, great performances, nice to look at -- but what this movie is missing is something to hold it together in the middle.

Filled with some of the most extraordinary images of recent years, Beloved was apparently too powerful for audiences to handle back in 1998.

It is sure to be studied, debated and cherished decades from now when Americans look to film for insights on who we are and where we have been.

Demme masterfully exhibits both the harsh realities of the time with the unexplainable mystical world that settles in and around them like a fog, even if he has trouble making the two elements mesh.

Its spiritual messages, which are deep and true, redeem any structural flaws of this ambitious film.

a demanding, unsettling picture full of savage violence and deep-seated misery. Even when Sethe finds comfort in the arms of old friend Paul D ...the sight of their broken, scarred bodies coming together is heartbreaking rather than erotic.

Something rare: a brave film about the emotional toll of slavery, the anguish of memory and the cruel divisions that still sear African American lives.

Mournful and moving, eerie and uncompromising.

Both Winfrey and Demme get a lot wrong.

You don't necessarily enjoy it, in a sense, you simply experience it.