The film, based on Terry McMillan's novel, no doubt began with higher ambitions than magazine fiction to be read under a hairdrier: but its development is so bald and the colors so glossy that magazine fiction is the result.

| Dec 20, 2023

It comes across as a bland buppie soap opera, with scant storyline outside the shortcomings of a series of more or less useless, unattractive, unreliable or married men.

| Dec 20, 2023

Glutinous but pseudo-feminist.

| Dec 20, 2023

It takes its old-fashioned soap-opera formula and refurbishes it for the age of Oprah. What that means is that while the script by McMillan and Ronald Bass serves up moonstruck romantic fantasies, it speaks in the language of self-empowerment .

| Mar 31, 2008

Never escapes the queasy aura of Melrose Place: just another story about beautiful people with small problems.

Full Review | Apr 12, 2002

A pleasant if undemanding piece of work that is diverting to sit through though it won't stand up to any kind of rigorous examination.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 13, 2001

For all the pleasure there is in seeing effective, great-looking black women grappling with major life issues on screen, Waiting to Exhale is an uneven piece.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Whitaker clumsily mishandles what should be a 'you go, girl!' tour de force.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 1, 2000

This sister-celebratory adaptation of Terry McMillan's best-selling book is frequently delightful.

| Jan 1, 2000

The male-bashing taken to an extreme in Waiting to Exhale is starting to seem a little like crack for the female psyche, exhilarating in the short term but ultimately crippling and dangerous.

| Jan 1, 2000

You want the movie to stomp and rejoice and cry like a fool; instead it meanders and lollygags, occasionally flaring up, then sputtering again.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 1, 2000

An escapist fantasy that women in the audience can enjoy by musing, 'I wish I had her problems' - and her car, house, wardrobe, figure and men, even wrong men.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 1, 2000

McMillan and Bass have retained the book’s bawdy humor and joyful air of just-between-us-girls conspiracy.

| Original Score: B | Dec 22, 1995