Missed this one along the way - but it has some great talent in it. Pfeiffer and Lange are country sisters that finally come to grips with a dark childhood on the farm. Daddy is a southern tyrant and family is country dysfunctional.

Is there one character who isn't a walking disaster? Just one? I have enjoyed many of Jane Smiley's books, but I couldn't make it through A Thousand Acres. I was hoping the film would be better, but even a cast of very fine actors wasn't enough to redeem this. I wonder how this would have been received in the Me Too era.

Between 2 and 2.5 stars. Too conventional drama.

The performances can't save the uninteresting film.

Another stellar film by Jocelyn Moorehouse. A fantastic A-list cast with mesmerising performances. A formidable depiction of what women and girls endure in everyday life.

En flott film,på godt og vondt.

A poor film. I especially can't get past the fact that the father molested his daughters.

This could have been a lot better. A Southern American version of King Lear could have been really engaging as the play has so many strong good characters. It certainly wasn't bad but it just didn't real take advantage of the plot lines & skimmed over the issues.

Not bad, a bit depressing. Colin Firth does an American accent for the first time and it was pretty darn good.

well the rottentomatoes critics didn't approve but i thought this had a great cast w/ great courageous acting by lange and pfeiffer... really started to hate the father early in. harsh yet touching and inspirational movie.

2.5/4 Stars Some critics say that this movie would not be a movie that would be entertaining nor interesting, but this movie amused and interested me in some parts. Sure some parts were not understandable, but I still was amused by the performances by Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and the late Jason Robards. I was amused by the rage of Robards and the great performances from Pfeiffer and Lange. This is not a movie I'll watch over and over, but I'll still recommend this movie.

A good movie I highly recommend it.

Stellar cast, great sets, krappy script.

(from The Watermark, 09/28/97) The true soap opera award, though, has to go to A Thousand Acres in which an angry feminist has decided to tell King Lear from a women-as-victims point of view. Jason Robards is an old Iowa farmer who decides to divide up his land equally among his three daughters (Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Jennifer Jason Leigh). When Robards and Leigh have a falling out, Lange and Pfeiffer get the property, and then Robards changes his mind, and takes them to court to get the land back. This is just one more thing piled onto the sisters' problems of sibling betrayal, cancer, infidelity, spousal abuse, and miscarriage. What the hell, throw in some incest for good measure, too. It's basically an overload of issues that create a film with no thematic focus. Lange's performance is what holds the film together. She is brilliantly understated as the dowdy and repressed farm wife, though her character's transition is too clunky and hard to swallow. Pfeiffer, looking horribly out of place as the middle sister (Did nobody learn from Frankie and Johnny that you just can't make her look dowdy?), is just plain angry and one dimensional, as is Robards. It comes from a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Jane Smiley, and of course the classic work of Shakespeare... how could it be this misguided when it had so much going for it?

Phenomenal and endearing film.

Could have been a different ending...easy to lose interest in.

Pfeiffer is the best thing in it

So sad what dad did to the girls, when they were teenagers.

He leido el libro y me gustó mucho.Estos dramas en los que secretos del pasado acaban saliendo a la luz y tienden a ser terribles,me apasionan..y ver actrices maravillosas de la talla de Pfeiffer,Lange,J.J.Leigh..sin olvidar a Jason Robards,es estupendo.La adaptación me gustó.

One can definitely see the "King Lear" influence in the film. The portrayal of the father-daughter relationship falling apart is well written and acted, but the story takes so many jerky twists that all smoothness or flow is lost. By the end the audience is left lukewarm, not quite crying but not quite satisfied.