Ordinary People: Critic Reviews

A moving, intelligent and funny film about disasters that are commonplace to everyone except the people who experience them.

An intelligent, perceptive, and deeply moving film.

The film looks austere and serious, rather as if it had been shot inside a Frigidaire, and the oppressiveness of the images tends to strangle laughter, even at the most absurd excesses of Alvin Sargent's script.

A powerfully intimate domestic drama.

What Redford accomplishes is to provide an excellent portrait of how well families can hide their inner turmoil from the prying eyes of outsiders.

An austere and delicate examination of the ways in which a likable family falters under pressure and struggles, with ambiguous results, to renew itself.

Better than forever being dismissed with a huffy "I can't believe that beat Raging Bull".

Story of emotional honesty is best for older kids.

Only reaching Chekhovian heights in its dreams.

Fully deserving of its many accolades.

For an Oscar-winner it's unusually bleak but the power is very carefully controlled.

This dissection of family mores in upscale suburbia is emotionally powerful, decidedly unsentimental, and the suitable text for the feature directorial debut of Robert Redford.

A beautifully acted film about the impact of a family tragedy on those who blame themselves and others.

A beautifully acted film about the impact of a family tragedy on those who blame themselves and others.

Robert Redford chose to adapt Judith Guest's novel as his first directorial effort, with impressive results.

An actors' movie and an advert for therapy, extremely bitter, but handsomely directed in its elegant pretentiousness.

The 1980 drama hasn't aged well.

It is Redford's ability to let the movie breathe...that forces the viewer to experience the film on a visceral level.

It works fairly on the screen, but holds none of the effectiveness of Guest's novel.