Despite the golden promise of the cornfields, its crops are barren.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 27, 2019

Both beg the question of whether rage or forgiveness is the correct moral response to immoral acts. It's a good question, but one that's probably better contemplated by reading a good book rather than watching a pale imitation.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 27, 2019

With, in effect, two authors to accommodate, the movie exhausts the audience by piling on the tear-jerky plot: fatal diseases and accidents, extramarital affairs, lawsuits, you name it.

| Nov 27, 2019

This is the type of perverse material which would have made a fine high-profile spectacle from the late 1950s or 60s, when its issues could ride the line between sacred and profane, obvious and subtle.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Sep 7, 2018

A Thousand Acres plays like five masochistic Lifetime-channel movies that have been mashed together until they have all the flavor of strained peas.

| Original Score: F | Sep 7, 2011

From the first frame, a silhouetted barn and windmill at dawn, the images feel prefab, and the all-purpose wistful tinkly piano and sighing strings pin them even more boringly down.

| Jul 3, 2008

Cry, cry, cry. Hug, hug, hug. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

| Jul 3, 2008

All the characters are sharply defined, with Lange and Pfeiffer in fine form, and Robards suitably sour as the grumpy old curmudgeon, but the plot has been watered down until it is little more than a Waltons-styled soap.

| Jul 3, 2008

Proof that Hollywood no longer knows how to make that former staple, the women's picture.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 3, 2008

Owing more to the spirit of Oprah than to the Bard, pic serves up an earnest but unconvincing stew of received notions about family dysfunction, awkwardly put across by a script wheezing with melodramatic contrivances.

Full Review | Jul 3, 2008

The story is just an empty, manipulative compilation of tragedies and misunderstandings.

| Jul 3, 2008

In many ways, it has less in common with Shakespeare's tragedy than with Stephen King's Iowa-set horror story, Children of the Corn.

| Jul 3, 2008

Robards' senile paterfamilias is, regrettably, a grave embarrassment.

| Feb 9, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 23, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jun 22, 2005

It's a pretty powerful analysis of an extended family (where lifelong friends in farming are integral to the well being of a community) shot apart by power and greed.

| Original Score: B- | Apr 9, 2005

... just doesn't work.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Mar 31, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 21, 2005

Fans of Jane Smiley's enthralling Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, will find the movie version disappointing.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 1, 2004

Great novels are usually adapted into bad movies.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/10 | May 7, 2004