David Denby

“In Kathleen Turner, Coppola has got an actress who can make the smallest, most vagrant desire or hesitation dramatic. In the opening scenes, set in 1985, Peggy Sue Kelcher goes to a party--the twenty-fifth reunion of her high-school class--and Turner, breathing deeply, mouth dropping in panic, seems a little overwrought. But her distress makes sense soon enough…. [W]hat really bothers her is that the worthless husband she has loved since senior year has left her…. 

 “Coppola mixes romance and satire, and he heightens everything just enough so that her ambiguous reactions (girlish ardor and adult disillusion) have equal emotional weight. He stays so close to Peggy Sue that the whole movie seems to be her superheated dream, and Kathleen Turner achieves the amazing feat of playing 18 and 43 at the same time. When Peggy Sue argues with herself over her hopeless husband-to-be (should she marry him all over again?), what she feels and what she knows fight so hard for predominance that she's nearly torn apart by the struggle....” 

-- David Denby, New York, October 20, 1986

(originally quoted on this blog in 2005)