Mortal Thoughts

Director Rudolph keeps the pacing tight and the atmosphere emotionally charged, so that even when his experiment in storytelling doesn't quite work, Mortal Thoughts is still compelling. [19 Apr 1991, p.4]

Alan Rudolph's direction is active but unintrusive, highlighting some of the more chilling moments with slow-motion sequences and odd cross-cutting. [19 Apr 1991, p.E1]

It's a sleeper - the kind of fresh, dark, edgy, formula-shunning surprise that snaps you out of the usual Hollywood-induced torpor and nudges you back into believing in movies. [19 Apr 1991, p.44]

A gripping and pungent film noir, in which the hard facts and sharp emotions of a police thriller are softened by a subtle drift toward dreaminess and moody abstraction. [19 Apr 1991, p.C]

I wish it ended better, but Mortal Thoughts is easily the most interesting movie of the year to date. And it's a throwback to that time at the movies when a single murder was a big deal. Run, don't walk. [19 Apr 1991, p.G5]

Alan Rudolph’s Mortal Thoughts is a movie just like the true crime stories I enjoy the most. Read full review

The three main performances are uniformly good. Moore maintains a believable air of normalcy pushed into unusual directions. Headly is marvelously kooky, a victim with sporadic moments of spunk. Willis clearly has a blast playing evil unbound. He's disconcertingly good, a whirl of Method-acting menace and goateed aggression. Read full review

While not entirely successful, Mortal Thoughts is surprisingly compelling. Headly and Moore go all-out with their working-girl mannerisms, but their friendship rings true and their ill-considered decisions are made strangely believable by their desperation. Read full review

The good news about Alan Rudolph's new film, Mortal Thoughts, is that it is dramatically engrossing, brilliantly acted by its big-star cast and filled with the touches of a virtuoso director at the top of his form. The bad news is that it leads us to one of the worst shaggy-dog endings of any mystery story I can remember. It's so totally unsatisfying, in fact, that it almost spoils all the good scenes that have come before it. [19 Apr 1991]

In lesser hands, Mortal Thoughts could have been another well-intentioned, star-studded lesson about how women tolerate and rebel against physical abuse. But as directed by Alan Rudolph, the film is more of a nightmare of half-baked schemes hatched by dim-witted characters. [19 Apr 1991, p.C]

As a domestic melodrama, the film sometimes plays like The Honeymooners without the laughs, but the push and pull between the flashbacks and the interrogation scenes gain steadily in strength as the case gets harder to pin down. There’s more to these characters—and this movie—than initially meets the eye. Read full review

This intricate, intellectually satisfying and emotionally involving murder mystery risks falling between two stools. Neither an 'Alan Rudolph Film' nor a glossy star vehicle, it has a naturalistic tone, a conventional plot, measured pacing, and a serpentine narrative. Read full review

After the global success of Ghost, Demi Moore consolidates here with a diametrically-opposed follow-up, not only proving her willingness to eschew the many Ghost-alikes that have inevitably come her way, but also allowing her to show genuine versatility in the thespian-prowess department. Read full review

Played straight and for sympathy, tale of dark retaliation goes astray early on, despite the promise created at the outset by imaginative, energetic production and appealing performances. Read full review

Mortal Thoughts has a good cast and a lot to recommend it, but what it doesn't have is the kind of dramatic payoff that makes so much extended buildup and explanation seem worthwhile. Read full review

Mortal Thoughts is limited both by its scope and its structure, a relentlessly long Q&A session that relates what happened through a series of flashbacks. It grows tedious at first, then becomes frustrating as the women bungle their alibis and the truth is revealed. [19 Apr 1991, p.6]

Mortal Thoughts has strong moments, but fails to keep you riveted to the end. Read full review

The script is awash with uncertainties -- some intriguing, some frustrating. The wildly uneven director Rudolph also must shoulder some of the blame. What cannot be underestimated in Mortal Thoughts are the performances. Absolutely extraordinary all the way around. Disappointments don't come more intriguingly packaged than in Mortal Thoughts. Read full review

The moviemakers have set out to interpret the inner workings of abusive relationships in their boundless variety. Alas, their ambitions are far grander than their abilities. Read full review

Throughout the film Rudolph is working hard to put this thing over, mixing in slow-motion and shock cuts. But his heart is not really in it. His technique is both too good and not enough for this material, and it doesn't sit right. He's trying to glamorize dread. [19 Apr 1991, p.F1]

In Rudolph's own scripts there's usually a foundation of whimsy that somehow balances out his acid-edged commentary on human follies. Here, there's only a standard murder-mystery plot that cheats on its ending and an East Coast locale where funny accents and hairdos are the real victims. [19 Apr 1991, p.25]

Despite the efforts of the talented director, Alan Rudolph (The Moderns, Choose Me), and his experienced cast, Mortal Thoughts is a formulaic TV-sized feature conceived to cash in, and put a feminist spin on, some of the emotions stirred up by Fatal Attraction; unfortunately, it seldom gets intense enough to stir up any emotion. [19 Apr 1991]

Hoooooooooooo-hum. [19 Apr 1991, p.R13]

Director Alan Rudolph and writers William Reilly and Claude Kerven don't play fair with the audience. They stack the deck and then deal from the bottom, and the result is such a surprise that I felt let down, even angry. I don't mind not figuring out who the murderer is, but Rudolph should show the viewer a few things along the way to allow it to be figured out. [19 Apr 1991, p.3F]

Mortal Thoughts is a mystery that any halfway-OK hack might turn into a halfway-OK movie by bagging all pretense to art and simply telling a story. But that isn't the style of Alan Rudolph, whose last space shot was Love at Large; the result is a quirky boo-boo I suspect is already halfway out of theaters. [19 Apr 1991, p.2D]

Directed by Alan Rudolph (Choose Me), this tedious film, rife with flashbacks and slow-motion sequences that underscore the already overbearing plot and exaggerated characters, fails both as a mystery and as a statement on marital violence. Read full review