Steel Magnolias

It may be unfair to compare a film with its stage source, but the fact remains that the film, while retaining a great deal of both humour and pathos, is a less persuasive work and more obviously a vehicle for a starry ensemble. Read full review

Steel Magnolias is an old-fashioned "klatsch" film, a prefeminist relic in which a group of women eschew the public world of men in favor of the community of the coffee table. Their world is shown as inferior to men's in terms of power but superior to it in emotion and insight into the things that "really matter." Read full review

Thanks to Field's no-nonsense performance, this potentially maudlin scenario is briskly handled...With all the male characters kept strictly functional, it makes a shameless bid for your heart, aiming to have you smiling one moment, sniffling the next. Read full review

Everything Terms of Endearment's detractors accused Terms of being: a synthetic, manipulative tragi-comedy with performances more appropriate to a proscenium arch - or to a drag show - than to the wide screen. And yet, there are moments in the movie of high comedy and sequences of searing truth. At its worst, Steel Magnolias is vastly inferior to Designing Women; at its best, it brings to mind (but never equals) Tennessee Williams. [20 Nov 1989]

It's the feelings, the tears, the laughter, the stuff that makes Gene Shalit stand up and cheer. It's showboating time and if that's what you want, the "Magnolias" gangplank lies before you. Read full review

Steel Magnolias is pop entertainment of an especially condescending, superficial sort. Its bitchiness and greeting-card truisms are made no more palatable by the fact that Mr. Harling probably wrote it with as much sincerity and passion as Mr. Shepard put into "Fool for Love." Read full review