Beaches

Buena Vista Pictures | Release Date: December 21, 1988

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

46	METASCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 18 Critic Reviews

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Mixed:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

Rita Kempley

Whatever its failings, Beaches speaks to women. It makes girlfriends think of calling girlfriends they haven't seen in 10, 20, 30 years. You can live without love, but "you've got to have friends," as Midler sings. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

[An] engaging tearjerker. Read full review

Martha Baker

Beaches is worth seeing simply for the production number in which Midler puts her bosom to good use, and watching the buck-toothed, flamingo-haired Mayim Bialik perform as Midler at 11 is so realistic one wonders if magic mirrors have been used.[15 Jan 1989, p.6C]

Gene Siskel

I heard some sniffling among some audience members, but the story goes for one situation that is guaranteed to produce sympathy. Aside from that, we never accept Midler in her relationship with John Heard. Only her occasional singing redeems an otherwise emotional roller coaster that travels in slow motion. Barbara Hershey is wasted in a boring role. Read full review

Jay Scott

Laughter, tears and Bette Midler: Santa's done a whole lot worse. [23 Dec 1988]

Roger Ebert

Beaches begins on a note of impending doom, and that colors everything else with an undertone of bittersweet poignancy and, believe me, there is only so much bittersweet poignancy I can take in any one movie. Read full review

David Ansen

For the most part, however, Beaches is lean cuisine. It's not quite good enough to ring with any authenticity and not quite tasteless enough to be a glitzy, trashy wallow. But it has one enormous, undeniable asset: Bette Midler. [26 Dec 1988, p.66]

EmpireKim Newman

Sentimental, cliched and at times overdone but a true weepy if ever there was one. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

But even though tear-jerking has never been so blatant, your tears of laughter are replaced, dammit, by tears of grief. Read full review

Dave Kehr

Beaches is a melodrama in the original sense of the term: a drama with music. And as long as the melo is handled by Bette Midler, who performs half a dozen songs, Beaches can`t be all bad. But the drama, as transacted between Midler and Barbara Hershey, is pretty dreadful. Read full review

Bill Cosford

Beaches is the never-less-than-maudlin soap opera about two childhood pen pals who meet again as adults, enjoy triumphs and endure failures, and wind up watching their story climax via a Fatal Illness straight out of Terms of Endearment. It's what used to be called a "women's picture." [13 Jan 1989, p.C5]

Jay Boyar

This is the sort of picture in which people slap each other as they take their marriage vows, suddenly develop life-threatening diseases, and, again, have violent confrontations whenever there's a break in the action. Anything for a laugh, anything for a tear, and nothing much authentic. Read full review

TV Guide MagazineStaff (Not Credited)

This interminable melodrama purports to be a warm, humorous, and moving look at the relationship of two women over the course of 30 years. In reality BEACHES is a trite, maudlin, and terribly superficial effort of the sub-made-for-TV quality, an insult to anyone who has ever befriended another human being. Read full review

Jonathan Rosenbaum

The film's oily overdefinition of various class and cultural categories (ranging from “poor” and “well-to-do” to “avant-garde” and “vulgar”) is strident enough to betray a condescending attitude toward the audience. Read full review

Sheila Benson

The most shamelessly manipulative movie since they shot the dog in "The Biscuit Eater." Read full review

Hal Lipper

Beaches, adapted from novelist Iris Rainer Dart's hankie-wringer, is truly horrid. Its only redeeming qualities are heartfelt performances by Midler and Barbara Hershey, as pen-pal buddies since pre-adolescence. [13 Jan 1989, p.6]

Pauline Kael

If you admired Bette Midler in The Rose and Down and Out in Beverly Hills, you may want to bash you head against the wall...The director, Garry Marshall, shows no feeling for the material - not even false feeling.

Jay Carr

Although we're only two weeks into 1989, we've already got a movie so resoundingly awful that it's bound to stand the test of time and emerge as one of the year's worst. [13 Jan 1989, p.48]