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Playing an atypically quiet character for the most part, Maggie Smith is excellent in this film, and she deservedly won the BAFTA award for Best Actress for her role. As for the film itself, it is also powered by some fine acting from Marie Kean, and the motivations are interesting for each and every character - the film is a study of why different persons do what they do and what they expect in return. Sadly the snail's pacing is a bit slow for the material to have vigor, and some techniques used do not come off well, such as the melding of flashbacks and double narration with two characters each saying their thoughts. The gloom and anger in the film tend to verge on the excessive, but yet these sad emotions bring extra power to the story, and there really is not much of a story - in terms of events - to work with, but the film manages to do a satisfactory job. However, to call Smith satisfactory would not be justice at all. She is simply wonderful, in one of her last great performances, and the film is worth seeing for her work in it alone.

This was a strong and moving movie. In fact, it even made me both a bit upset and a bit depressed - because Miss Hearne's fate in upper middle age, was my own big fear before I met my husband and had my children. Not until I had two children I felt reasonably safe. This was because like Miss Hearne I had no siblings, and where she had only an old aunt, who later died, I had my parents - but they were also old and I knew that half my life I would live without them...

Miss Hearne's sad and lonely life, waiting for Mr Right who she as a young girl pictured as "tall, dark, and handsome" (well - what girl hasn't..?), in time lowering her expectations more and more, and seeking comfort in religion as well as the bottle - is only too common also in real life.

The acting was excellent all around, as was the picture of the time, and the melancholy mood created by bleak photo and classical music both beautiful and sad.

I really recommend this movie, but with one exception: if you are yourself in the same situation as Miss Hearse - then maybe you should not watch it. Because it is the opposite of feel-good, and can make you only sadder.

This is a mediocre movie containing one performance so brilliant and so powerful and so beautiful that it deserves ten stars all by itself. Obviously I'm talking about Maggie Smith as Judith Hearne. The other actors - Hoskins, Kean, McNiece and the rest - are fine, but beside Smith in THIS role they come off as amateurs.

The story is so annoyingly melodramatic and manipulative that I would have turned it off if Smith hadn't been there in almost every scene, transforming a cheap soap opera into a vehicle for the finest, smartest, rawest, most moving and most exhilarating acting performance I have ever seen in the thousands of movies I've watched in the past 60+ years.

Thank God this performance was not made tawdry and commonplace by winning an Oscar. It is much too good for so sleazy an award.

As Judith Maggie Smith turns in the performance of a lifetime and one of the best and most complete portrayals by any actor on film. This is an astonishing film, full of bleak Irish heartbreak, yet with the promise of hope.

Smith is a no less than a revelation in the title role and one cannot help but route for this desperate character even when all looks hopeless. The screenplay had been fought over for years by actresses of every stripe, with, for a while, Jane Fonda, leading the pack of actresses trying to get Judith onto the screen. It's a good thing Maggie Smith won out.

The ensemble cast of actors led by Bob Hoskins is fully up to Smith's standard and the emotional wallops this movie packs are big ones indeed.

George Delarue's score is simply perfect underlying with the exact weight and gravity - and sweetness - of every situation.

When is this thing coming out on DVD? It's simply ridiculous it hasn't yet appeared.

Highest recommendation.

Why isn't this available on DVD? What is wrong with the studios? This is a very moving film. It is not entirely faithful to the wonderful book on which it is based, but that doesn't matter. It captures the lonely desperation of the characters, especially Judith. Ah, this is a sad film. It is a marvelous, sad movie, and it has two of the best actors ever -- Maggie Smith and the incomparable Bob Hoskins. Please -- release this on DVD!