David Denby

“Watching Crimes of the Heart … , we wait for the moods to settle in and deepen, and for the camera to find something startling in the faces of the three extraordinary actresses dominating the action. But either Henley doesn't go far enough in her characteristic mode of grotesque nostalgia or Beresford is too impersonal and fussy to make the performances pay off, for nothing onscreen has much emotional weight…. [I]t's a comedy of moral negligence and inconsequence in which people do extraordinarily cruel things to themselves and to others without meaning any harm. Diane Keaton, in the stock role of the fearful spinster, Lenny, wears a limp cardigan and rushes around the set hugging her elbows to her sides… I wish these three had reacted to one another like the barbarously unstable chemicals in TNT; instead, the movie achieves something like a mild fizz that never reaches the top of the glass.”

David Denby
New York, December 15, 1986