Over four decades in, Ordinary People is still compelling and remarkable because it conveys a delicate emotional intelligence that rings true regardless of race, class, ethnicity, or gender.

| Sep 23, 2024

What makes Ordinary People special is how it treats mental illness and depression with sincerity and relatability.

| Jun 27, 2023

While the subject content brings about some heavy themes that are not easy to discuss, Robert Redford hits it out of the park with Ordinary People.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 23, 2023

It does not want to shock you, provoke you, frighten you, intellectually stimulate you, or even teach you anything you do not already know.

| Aug 8, 2022

Ordinary People is rare moviemaking and easily one of the best films of 1980. But to spurt volumes of superlatives would not do it justice. Redford's film is deceptively quiet and subtle.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 20, 2022

Redford has made a neat, tasteful picture, elegantly autumnal in tone and time, that harks back to those rather more strident Freudian family dramas that Hollywood produced in the 1950s.

| Jul 15, 2022

Putting it crudely, I don't think a first-time director should make such a display of his own sensitivity. What Redford reveals of the Jarretts just isn't surprising or complex enough to justify all this gravity.

| Jul 15, 2022

Ordinary People is a work any director would be pleased with, and as a first time effort it is exceptional.

| Jul 15, 2022

The movie is just as sanitized as the fantasy of upper-middle-class life it sets out to expose. And it’s just as empty and orderly.

| Jul 15, 2022

Does anybody need to be told yet again that bourgeois life mummifies people -- or that madness can await those who fight the smugness and placidity?

| Jul 15, 2022

Alvin Sargent's screenplay is admirable and the performances by young Hutton, Sutherland (his best in years) and Moore are all remarkable.

| Jul 15, 2022

We should be thankful that it offers Donald Sutherland a rare opportunity to live up to his potential; he plays his role with an acute sensitivity to the gradual shifts in manner which should accompany a spiritual awakening.

| Jul 15, 2022

If anything, Redford is almost too unbending, intent on imposing the stamp of his own discipline. But the performances he extracts from his three leads, especially newcomer Tim Hutton... reflect his own quality.

| Jul 15, 2022

For his debut as a director, Robert Redford has made a film that sometimes falters in its pace and is a shade too calculated in its glossy irony. But Ordinary People is also a harrowingly accurate study of a family at war.

| Jul 15, 2022

It's a powerful beginning for a new director, and its sobriety and stern avoidance of sensationalism put it well beyond the range of the average family film.

| Jul 15, 2022

The upshot is engaging and serious-minded. It is a film which deserves attention not only for its message -- that love should dare speak to its name -- but also for its emotional nuances.

| Jul 15, 2022

With his first attempt at directing, superstar Robert Redford proves he is as capable behind the camera as in front of it. Ordinary People is impressive by any standards.

| Jul 15, 2022

It is an excellent first feature because of its care and refusal to indulge its audience with either sentiment or melodrama. And if it ultimately fails as a really first-class film, it is only because of a certain literalness of approach.

| Jul 15, 2022

Alvin Sargent's devastatingly realist screenplay adaptation of the novel by a Minneapolis housewife, Judith Guest, sounds like the transcript of a typical civilised family's roundtable non-discussion.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 15, 2022

It cares deeply enough about its subject to be more than a little earnest in pursuing it quietly, delicately, and from the inside out. From the first line of dialogue, it's an actor's film -- which is not to underrate the director but to compliment him.

| Jul 14, 2022