Stanley Kauffmann

"Almost everything in the making of the film is extraordinarily good . . . . [get review; don't know what I'm leaving out] . . . . [T]he welcome surprise is that Menges has concentrated on the acting--with fine results. It's all solid, confident, strong. . . .

“Jodhi May, the English girl who plays Molly, is irresistible, almost precisely because she seems so resistible at first. Not only is she not particularly pretty, her feature lack distinction; she is slightly round-shouldered, and she is given a real mixing-bowl haircut. These very matters become endearing before long, become essential to the Molly that she believes in and creates. The adolescent still has some of the overt dependencies of a child (soon to become covert), and she has enough intelligence to know that her demands are childish even though she can't help making them. As Diana's political convictions lead to separation from her family, Molly begins to resent her mother's choices: to the daughter, those choices imply more concern with activism than with family, a willingness to be separated from them. May gives these angers full body and, with Menges's help, also gives us the blossoming adult beneath them who understands her mother's courage.

“The fate of gifted adolescent actors is even more unpredictable than that of gifted adults. Whatever became, for instance, of the marvelous Patricia Gozzi who was in Sundays and Cybele and Rapture in the early 1960s? I hope that, 20 years from now, the same question won't be asked about Jodhi May.”

Stanley Kauffmann
New Republic, July 18 & 25, 1988
[Unless, of course, May’s happily withdrawn from public life by then.]