Jack Kroll

“If this sounds like soap opera, it is--but the higher soap opera that has hit a nerve in audiences with movies like "Kramer" and "The Seduction of Joe Tynan." "Ordinary People" shimmers with virtues: Redford has worked very effectively with his screenwriter, his cinematographer John Bailey and his cast to achieve an admirable balance of literary, visual and acting values. His handling of actors is especially good; he saw something in TV's Mary Tyler Moore that nobody else saw--the tension behind that all-American smile. [Some saw it, Kauffmann for one.] In Beth that smile, stretching Moore's mouth and neck tendons in a flying buttress of rigid control, becomes scary. It's a fine performance by an actress extending her range, and it's matched by the best acting Donald Sutherland has done in a long time….

“If the film has a problem, it's a kind of excess of goodness at the expense of imaginative excitement. [Not a bad point, but the goodness doesn't really extend to the treatment of Beth.]

Jack Kroll
Newsweek, September 22, 1980