The Color Purple is the year's best film.

Let's put it this way: To miss this film is to cheat yourself and your family of a memorable moviegoing experience. [20 Dec 1985]

The film deserves praise for its heartwarming, empowering presentation of the strength and nobility of black women.

Unashamedly emotional, it either totally grabs you or leaves you cold.

Although the combination of his sensibilities and Miss Walker's amounts to a colossal mismatch, Mr. Spielberg's Color Purple manages to have momentum, warmth and staying power all the same.

There are some great scenes and great performances in The Color Purple, but it is not a great film.

For the film's existence alone we can be grateful, and it contains at least three memorable performances, but the transition has been at a harrowing cost to the tone and scale and even the underlying theme of Alice Walker's book. [18 Dec 1985]

A lavishly illustrated, well-intended, self-inflicted knockoff.

The film is mystical in tone but peculiarly inexact and weepy in execution - it embodies the apotheosis of pathos. [21 Dec 1985]

There are many scenes in The Color Purple that are strong and affecting. They do not, however, compensate for the often hackneyed vision of domestic humor, the overreaching for artsiness, the rambling final 20 minutes or so in which Mr. Spielberg subjects us to the sight of hordes of blacks leaving the sinful confines of a jazz club and heading off to church, having already been overcome by a joyous fit of gospel singing. [19 Dec 1985]

A lot of good actors (Danny Glover, Margaret Avery, Adolph Caesar, Rae Dawn Chong) are lost to Spielberg's shallow melodrama; the only one who emerges with any clarity is Oprah Winfrey, perhaps because Spielberg shares her shameless crowd-pleasing instincts.