The Accused

Foster is simply fantastic as the tough Sarah, unshakeable in her belief that justice has not been done and that she has a right to demand it. McGillis, from a slow start, builds beautifully and by the time the action has switched to the courtroom, she has shed her starchy persona for a true advocate's passion. Read full review

An experience that is sometimes unbearable and always riveting. [14 Oct 1988]

A consistently engrossing melodrama, modest in its aims and as effective for the cliches it avoids as for the clear eye through which it sees its working-class American lives. Read full review

For some men, the movie will reveal a truth that most women already know. It is that verbal sexual harassment, whether crudely in a saloon back room or subtly in an everyday situation, is a form of violence - one that leaves no visible marks but can make its victims feel unable to move freely and casually in society. It is a form of imprisonment. Read full review

Katheryn's summation was meant to be the final flourish, but McGillis gives a flat-footed performance. However, Foster overcomes McGillis' inertia, as the sweet-natured Sarah, a lonely little waitress who makes her home in a trailer park. Under her tight jeans and tough talk, she proves as fragile as a ballerina on a music box. Foster creates the ultimate victim without ever becoming a wimp, mixing dignity with defenselessness. The Accused must be acquitted of its misdemeanors if not for its good intentions, for this vibrant performance. Read full review

What begins as an unflinching account of the victim's hospitalization, interrogation, feelings of anger and fear of intimacy, eventually succumbs to courtroom theatrics.[14 Oct 1988, p.6]

The Accused is far from a perfect film, but it's got a terrific performance by Foster, a pretty good one by McGillis, and Lansing's knack for casting women's issues in a form that makes people go see them at the movies. [14 Oct 1988, p.49]

The great film that The Accused could have been is in there. So is Foster's lovely, measured work, the work of an actress at the top of her art, and this in a supposed "comeback." Yes, darker and more sadistic passages have burdened many lesser movies. But this one has ambition, and this one has this performance. It's a hard movie to like; it's an impossible one to ignore. [14 Oct 1988, p.E1]

It powerfully manipulates our emotions of outrage and revenge but tends to sacrifice human subtlety for polemics. It leaves the thin aftertaste of a TV movie. It doesn't help that McGillis give a dull, leaden performance, rendering her side of the story more perfunctory than it needed to be. Foster must carry the show alone; she seems to compact a lifetime of hard knocks into this furious, touching performance. [24 Oct 1988, p.74]

Only a riveting performance by Jodie Foster lifts THE ACCUSED above the level of a television movie. Read full review

Foster and McGillis never quite make the transition from ideological mouthpieces to fully developed dramatic figures. [14 Oct 1988, p.C]

A preachy, empty story, enlivened by a great central performance and generous dollops of self-delusion, not the least offensive of which are Topor's and Lansing's quoted comparisons of their movie to the moral climate of the Holocaust. To paraphrase dear Joseph Welch, have they no shame? [14 Oct 1988, p.4]