Once again, Streep adds a third dimension to a two-dimensional medium; once again she brings humanity and intelligence to a remarkable portrait that must be added to what has become a gallery of such portraits.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 25, 2023

Sydney Pollack's glorious and stirring Out of Africa is a big-screen epic in the very best sense.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 13, 2021

The beauty of Out of Africa, From the very opening shots, is rhapsodic and illustrative rather than dramatic. This large-scale adaptation of Isak Dinesen's marvelous memoir never catches fire.

| Jan 13, 2021

The movie could probably be shorter, but I didn't wish it so.

| Jan 13, 2021

There comes a time in movie addicts' lives when their souls cry out for the kind of film that can fill the screen with magnificent vistas, grand passions and charismatic actors. That's why the arrival of Out of Africa is cause for cheering.

| Jan 12, 2021

The most-remembered moments of Out of Africa are the travelogue sequences, which is not what the book or the author are all about.

| Jan 12, 2021

The genuine worth of Out of Africa will rest on whether it inspires viewers to seek out the books of Isak Dinesen. The film's fidelity to these haunting and intensely personal writings is at once its great strength -- and its weakness.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 12, 2021

The book and its characters are simply not translatable to the screen, and what we get is a sufferable alternative.

| Jan 12, 2021

Director Sydney Pollack and Redford screenwriter Kurt Luedtke... have made an intelligent, beautiful, thoughtful film with enormous respect for its audiences. Luedtke's screenplay his second film is so assured he even dares to use silence.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Jan 12, 2021

The result of Pollack's approach Is a distancing between the viewer and the movie. This is not the kind of film that reaches out and envelops you; it's an impersonal movie, the kind you step back from and observe.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Jan 12, 2021

Out of Africa may remind you of inheriting a wonderful piece of Victorian bric-a-brac from a beloved but long-lost great aunt. It's absolutely beautiful, special and odd... but what on earth to do with it -- or, in this case, to think about it?

| Jan 11, 2021

What's missing in.this respectful and often quite moving epic is a sense of Dinesen the storyteller.

| Jan 11, 2021

This may be the silliest serious movie since Reds. When you finally get the heck out of Africa, it's not a second too soon.

| Jan 29, 2020

The relationship between Blixen and her lover Denys Finch Hatton is an idyllic series of outings among the gazelles -- picnics with poetry, beach parties, club dances and overnight hunts. It's an adoring, boring relationship.

| Jan 29, 2020

Redford is romantic, mysterious, uncageable; and he potently complements Meryl Streep's Blixen.

| Jan 29, 2020

We (the audience) wish at several paints during 2 1/2 hours of watching Blixen' s book vaporise into Love Story Goes To Kenya to be free of the movie. How it does go on.

| Jan 29, 2020

The scale of its protagonist's obsessiveness is what gives Out of Africa its splendor.

| Apr 26, 2018

Meryl Streep is back in top form. This means that her performance in Out of Africa is at the highest level of acting in film today. Since she is Streep, it means that a return to form is not a return: she has realized a character utterly different.

| Jan 9, 2018

The relationship between Karen Blixen and her British lover, Denys Finch Hatton, may fail to catch fire. But the production itself is so exquisitely served that you can't help but be grateful for this extraordinary visual treat.

| Feb 21, 2015

Luedtke and Pollack bought these high-priced literary sources only to chuck them for a conventional, largely fictionalized movie romance.

Full Review | Jan 6, 2014