Metacritic reviews

[Lange's] allure is staggering. If you've never seen her in this film - if you've never seen the young Jessica Lange, except in "Tootsie" - prepare to pick your jaw up off the floor.

Both leads excel at showing a true feeling (be it love or lust) but both covered in the guilty angst that one will betray the other. Edge of your seat stuff.

In the key roles, Nicholson and Lange are excellent, as is Michael Lerner as their defense attorney.

The disconnect between Rafelson’s low-key style and Cain’s hard-boiled storytelling is jarring at times.

The film's steamy sex scenes—especially the first, which takes place in the kitchen among foods and utensils as elemental as love and death-will raise eyebrows and temperatures...Like Last Tango in Paris, Rafelson's Postman shows what his doomed lovers do but does not tell who they are. Their willful sex scenes are explicit and incandescent; their motivations are elliptical smoke signals viewed from the other side of Death Valley.

An absolutely superb mounting of a hollow and disappointing production. It shows a technical mastery of filmmaking, and we are dazzled by the performances, the atmosphere, the mood of mounting violence. But by the second hour of the film we've lost our bearings: What is this movie saying about its characters? What does it feel and believe about them? Why was it necessary to tell their stories?

Nicholson and Lange make a class act, and the film does restore the overt sexuality missing from the 1946 version. But, disappointingly given his excellent track record with films like Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens and Stay Hungry, Bob Rafelson tries to make art out of high-grade pulp, with a resultant loss of energy.

Miss Lange is not a bad actress, but her miscasting is fatal to the picture and exemplifies its tiresomely genteel artfulness.

The film does, however, feature revealing performances from its leads, authentic production design, and atmospheric photography by Sven Nykvist.

The impulsiveness and raw flamboyance that make the book exciting are missing, and the cool, elegant visuals outclass the characters right from the start.