One True Thing: Critic Reviews

An emotional drama!

One True Thing celebrates the very things you don't miss, or even know exist, until they are gone.

Streep and Hurt, two of the best gestural actors working, let the showboating tics fly fast and thick.

It is the craftsmanship that elevates One True Thing above the level of a soaper.

Meryl Streep is an actress of such transcendent skill and sympathy that she regularly elevates her material, taking it up several notches and giving us feelings, insights, feelings and textures the original writer may have just missed expressing.

Streep's performance makes the movie worth seeing.

Sensitively written, fluidly directed and expertly acted!

A well-oiled machine manufactured to tap our welled-up ducts.

Franklin seems ill-suited to this cast and this material.

Although the plot rarely excels, the actors bring enough to their roles to transform this motion picture into a satisfying weeper.

Even director Carl Franklin...can't prevent One True Thing from descending into chick-movie hell.

One True Thing demonstrates that the power of simple things, the transcendent nature of the ordinary, can make for riveting filmmaking.

Probably won't appeal to teens.

Carl Franklin's understated direction keeps the tears and life-affirming revelations from congealing into chicken shmaltz for the soul.

There isn't one schmaltzy moment in the entire film, and any tears the viewer sobs into their hankies are well-earned.

The script shifts audience sympathies about quite adroitly, though it's a pity all the men had to be such humbugs.

There's a lot of Oscar timber here...

Streep, Zellweger, and Hurt are outstanding.

the movie ultimately belongs to Streep, who illuminates the extraordinary soul inside an everyday woman.

One of those rare films -- a movie that is genuinely sad and moving without being melodramatic, sentimental or hokey.

Streep's performance will probably secure her another Oscar nomination.

As finely wrought a drama as one could ask for.

Brings extraordinary honesty and keen emotional pitch to the family drama.

Thanks to Carl Franklin's clever direction, which always stays real close to the characters, what could have been a TV movie-of-the-week becomes a thought-provoking and touching film.

A heart-affecting film that challenges us to confront some of the myths and meanings we have constructed about our parents.