“Beloved” is easily one of the year’s best films. An emotionally intense motion picture.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 6, 2023

It's a daring and provocative collection of ideas and heart that needed to be better, but still has something going for it.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 2, 2022

Beloved stumbles a bit during its first half-hour. The narrative smooths itself out, however, and finds a groove that makes the remaining 145 minutes barely noticeable. More important, the length proves absolutely essential in conveying Sethe's story.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 2, 2022

The result is an extraordinary film that is always hypnotically watchable, even as it presents the audience with scenes of harrowing pain.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 2, 2022

Demme is the right choice to direct Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel: He brings to the movie his humanism, his fascination with nature and the inexplicable, and his respect for actors. As Sethe, Winfrey has rare grace and strength.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 2, 2022

It's been years since a movie literally gave me nightmares. But Beloved literally haunted me with bad dreams.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 2, 2022

Demme's Beloved is permanently heated to the boil. Rightly so, for the terrain of Toni Morrisons magisterial novel, on which the movie is based, is not the politics of slavery but its private agonies, the torture of evil turned inward against the self.

| Feb 2, 2022

Beloved overflows with passion and grace. It feels alive.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 2, 2022

The movie will be as haunting or irritating as your tolerance for bleak, serpentine storytelling will allow. It's a masterfully scripted conundrum.

| Original Score: A- | Feb 2, 2022

As a cerebral ghost story and a bitter slice of history, Beloved is as hard a movie to watch as it is to shake off afterward.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 2, 2022

This is a horror movie that means something. This is Sophie's Choice blended with The Exorcist.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 2, 2022

Demme’s visual sense is striking. He deals with some truly horrific material here, but it’s the little things that are truly provocative.

| Original Score: A- | Feb 2, 2022

There's excitement here, particularly for admirers of the world's most successful talk show host, who makes a triumphant big-screen return in a vehicle that would overpower a performer with less gumption.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 2, 2022

There is, however, a kind of excitement that runs through Beloved, and it is the movie's contagious sense of risk -- the sense that you are watching Hollywood operating outside the usual commercial strictures.

| Original Score: B | Feb 2, 2022

Though the fantasy element redone sparingly in the movie, they give it the feel of a good horror-mystery.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 2, 2022

Beloved forces the audience to look at slavery the way Schindler's List made it look at the Holocaust, and, if anything, it's even harder to watch.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 2, 2022

Winfrey's performance in the Jonathan Demme-directed movie resounds with emotional honesty, moving one to understand the depth of Sethe's lost self.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 2, 2022

To viewers who’ve seen a few arty thrillers, Beloved will seem almost familiar; it’s as much The Silence of the Lambs as it is a catharsis of America’s defining infamy.

| Feb 2, 2022

From the care with which it was made to its uniformly wonderful performances to the audacious scope of its theme, this is clearly a major motion picture. And yet, and yet. At 10 minutes short of three hours, Beloved is also a long haul.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 2, 2022

Beloved isn't bad -- there's way too much class, craft and intelligence involved at every level. But it's flawed in ways that make all the advance hosannas seem like so much hype.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 2, 2022