James Wolcott

“After a long hike into the cold north of historical drama in Reds and Mrs. Soffel, with a detour into the geopolitical hostilities of The Little Drummer Girl, Diane Keaton has slipped back into her sensible shoes to make a ditsy little gingerbread comedy--and jacked her intensity up another notch. Keaton doesn't coast in Crimes of the Heart … She gets so deep into her character's kooky poignance that she always appears on the verge of tremors. When Keaton embodied the spirit of urban romance in Woody Allen's work, she fidgeted on the neurotic surface, charmingly; now she obsesses on the inside, building up to the boom of small volcano. Keaton has tirades in Crimes of the Heart as boiling-over funny as Carol Burnett going off in a red fury. Playing her sisters, Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek certainly hold their own--Lange, particularly, has the jaunty, hayfed, high-bred gloss of a bluegrass filly. But it's Keaton as the nearly virginal dumpling with the "shrunken ovary" who gives this movie its most compelling vibration. Without her, Crimes of the Heart might be a mere sitcom….

“…. [W]hen [Lange] ambles her tall, easy stems across the screen, you understand immediately why a repressed speciman like Keaton's Lenny would be choked with envy. The greatness of Keaton's performance is that she subsumes her own erotic spark in order to embody the slow, damp mushroom growth of Lenny's sexual awakening. Stunted-virgin roles usually trail off into frilly mannerisms, but Keaton insists on solid cravings. She doesn't trim her desires in coquettish lace. Her Lenny has built around her shrunken ovaries a pleading wall of flesh. She's a soft fortress ready to be stormed.

“…. Laughing or raging … Diane Keaton holds nothing back. She has more inside her than she can possibly contain. At a time when our top Serious Actress is a dagger of ice like Meryl Streep, we need all the warm spills we can get. See Crimes of the Heart quick, before the lava cools.”

James Wolcott
Texas Monthly, date?