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

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'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

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

A disappointment a hodgepodge of images and unsatisfying storytelling.

| Feb 2, 2022

Beloved is a good movie. With a tighter ending, a shorter running time and fewer special effects, it could have been a great one.

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

Like The Thin Red Line an art-house movie strives to be a main line entertainment and satisfies neither audience.

| Feb 2, 2022

Beloved has moments of keening power and terrifying poetry.

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

Commendably serious and uncompromising.

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

Although Winfrey is hardly alone up there on the screen, her individual acting achievement cannot be dismissed.

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

It's an ambitious epic, an A-list event that, despite a flawless pedigree, seems to prove Morrison right: Her work is unfilmable.

| Original Score: B- | Feb 2, 2022

It's a noble tilt at Toni Morrison's complex Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. There are stunning period visuals and harrowing, sepia tinted flashbacks. But the film is overlong [and] frequently laboured.

| Feb 2, 2022

What's right in Beloved is powerfully right: its portrait of a tortured mother seeking forgiveness, its shocking depiction of slavery as a wrecker of bodies and a crusher of souls. What's wrong in the film, though, is dreadfully wrong.

| Feb 2, 2022

[Newton] gives what you'd have to call a remarkable performance, but Demme just doesn't provide the dramatic context that would make it believable.

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

Heartfelt acting and a vibrant visual sense paper over all manner of cracks.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 2, 2022

Oprah's performance is passionate and solid, anchoring the film well, but Thandie Newton (the young London-born actress from Flirting) perhaps steals the show.

| Feb 2, 2022

[Demme] seems overly keen to invest his film with a sober, humorless, hushed aura.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Feb 2, 2022

Everything that Morrison left inspirationally unsaid the film says.

| Feb 2, 2022

Beloved is a strong, dark, tangled powerhouse of a film that comes to grips with the scars of slavery as no previous American film has.

| Feb 2, 2022