The performances all around are tremendous.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Jan 17, 2025

Places in the Heart is not an altogether memorable film, but what strength it possesses comes from the fact that it has the courage of its orthodox convictions.

| Apr 7, 2020

Sally Field gives her best performance ever.

| Mar 23, 2020

You must simply accept the flood of emotion and let it wash over you, because the tears are jerked by performances that are informed by intelligence and taste as well as emotional honesty.

| Mar 23, 2020

I have no doubt that Robert Benton's Oscar-nominated Places In The Hear is a sincere film. But I find it pretty egregious just the same, covered with a thin layer of Hollywood treacle that consistently' prevents it packing the emotional punch intended.

| Mar 23, 2020

[The] story has the fond hues and textures of instant nostalgia, cosily wrapped in the Sunday rituals of the film's leisurely start and outrageously sentimental finish.

| Mar 23, 2020

Places in the Heart is a soft title for a strong movie.

| Mar 23, 2020

This is Benton back to his best -- the writer of Bonnie and Clyde and director of Bod Company, who finds the beating heart of his country in the countryside.

| Mar 23, 2020

For all its ingratiating certainties about human values, this rural drama has been pieced together with evident skill and care.

| Mar 23, 2020

Places of the Heart, too, seems an idealized vision of a film that might have been, but just didn't quite survive the journey from Robert Benton's heart to the audience's.

| Mar 23, 2020

[Places in the Heart is] sweet, though not saccharine. If the sense of place is very strong here, it's because four generations of Bentons have lived in the town where the story happens and the movie was filmed.

| Mar 23, 2020

To buy the movie, one has to buy the director's particular brand of Christian quietism.

| Aug 21, 2019

Even in a year that included the formidable likes of Amadeus, Stop Making Sense and The Terminator, this was the best picture of 1984.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 8, 2015

Headed by the versatile Sally Field, the cast of Places in the Heart is almost a convention of Hollywood's best character actors.

| Mar 9, 2015

This remarkably poignant drama of Depression-era Texas boasts Sally Field's finest performance since her Oscar-winning Norma Rae five years ago.

Full Review | Mar 9, 2015

A beautifully paced and sumptuously shot heart-twanger that won Sally Field a richly deserved best actress Oscar.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 9, 2015

Inspiring, intense tale about hardship, bigotry, redemption.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 5, 2014

Benton effectively re-creates depression-era Texas in this moving tale that landed the second Oscar for Field.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 3, 2012

Places in the Heart is a loving, reflective homage to his hometown by writer-director Robert Benton.

| Jun 5, 2008

Set in the Depression, Benton's memory film is too sanctimonious and idealistic, showing how economic misery and hard times bring out the best, here in the form of a new community, composed of a white widow and her children, a black hobo and a blind.

| Original Score: B- | Dec 6, 2007