book was great, movie is pretty good

Kathy Bates is very good here.

Totally & completely blew me away

Good performances although the story is a bit predictable.

Good Movie

Effective melodrama with feminist overtones: all the women are abused or misunderstood, all the men are abusers; what saves it from too much oversimplification is the revelation of the reasons for the edgy relationship between mother and daughter.

Credit Kathy Bates's outstanding performance for bringing to life King's ugly, dirty story of family abuse and tragedy. There are no shining characters or wonderful endings here; just the spit, fight, and will that a few women find at key moments of their respective lives.

A one-woman show - wonderful performance by a brilliant Bates.

This movie was very good. I did not expect Kathy Bates to be better than she was in Misery, but she was. Judy Parfitt was very good, and so was Christopher Plummer, as a detective who harbors revenge. A very good drama, and probably one of the better Steven King adaptations.

Good characterizations and a standout performance by Bates. I also liked some of the editing choices. But as more and more story secrets were revealed, I found myself less and less interested. By the end it all seemed obvious and routine, with the last ten minutes playing out like a makeshift and cliched courtroom drama.

Bates is an extraordinary actress, even if her dialect in this is hard on the ears, and Plummer is top-drawer as always. In terms of structure, it's great; the jumps in time are beautifully done. A fairly good plot, too, but the melodrama parts are pitched a bit high for my taste at times.

Friggin' little bastards!

It's the thespian nous of Jennifer Jason Leigh and Kathy Bates that ensures Dolores Claiborne so palpably resembles an anguished cry. That's because Hackford's melodramatic approach is simply lacklustre, the film defined as much by his, yes, hacky hand as by his stars' supremacy and Gabriel Beristain's hauntingly autumnal cinematography. Hackford can't make a great film, but these women could.