Barbara Hershey is wasted in a boring role.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 23, 2018

Anything for a laugh, anything for a tear, and nothing much authentic.

| Mar 23, 2018

Beaches epitomises the sort of triple-strength, three-hankie work you can expect from American women with three names and gives the lie to those who thought they stopped making women's pic heartstring-tuggers.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 23, 2018

Beaches is bloodless, and Garry Marshall's direction, which might have given it style, is completely competent and entirely without personality.

| Mar 22, 2018

For all of its insistence on the open, even gushing, expression of feeling, Beaches finally seems a little bit sneaky.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 22, 2018

The film's oily overdefinition of various class and cultural categories is strident enough to betray a condescending attitude toward the audience.

| Apr 7, 2010

[An] engaging tearjerker.

| Mar 26, 2009

Even though tear-jerking has never been so blatant, your tears of laughter are replaced, dammit, by tears of grief.

| Jan 26, 2006

Maybe the problem is with the flashbacks. Maybe if the whole story had simply been told from beginning to end, it would have felt less like one of those 1950s tearjerkers with the rain blowing in through the window and getting the curtains all wet.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Beaches is a bicoastal crowd-pleaser, a tenderhearted, two-hanky melodrama brightened with Bette Midler's sass and sweetened with her songs. Barbara Hershey (formerly Barbara Seagull) lends class to the unlikely equation.

| Jan 1, 2000