87
Metascore
16 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100Slant MagazineEd GonzalezSlant MagazineEd GonzalezThe film isn’t only revolutionary for its aesthetic rigorousness but its rare fascination with white America’s difficulty relating to people of color.
- 100TV Guide MagazineTV Guide MagazineIf Sirk exploits the material for all it's worth and seems to be sardonically allowing the artifical genre to devour itself as he sits back and watches, at the same time the weepie aspect is so melodramatic as to tear the sobs from your throat.
- 90Village VoiceVillage VoiceFifty-six years after it opened, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life remains the apotheosis of Hollywood melodrama — as Sirk’s final film, it could hardly be anything else — and the toughest-minded, most irresolvable movie ever made about race in this country.
- 89Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenAustin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenThe film is a biting critique of American race relations in the Fifties and a complex study in contrasts and paradoxes.
- 88Chicago ReaderDave KehrChicago ReaderDave KehrThe secret of Sirk's double appeal is a broadly melodramatic plotline, played with perfect conviction yet constantly criticized and challenged by the film's mise-en-scene, which adds levels of irony and analysis through a purely visual inflection.
- 80Time OutTime OutForget those who decry the '50s Hollywood melodrama; it is through the conventions of that hyper-emotional genre that Sirk is able to make such a devastatingly embittered and pessimistic movie.
- 80The New YorkerRichard BrodyThe New YorkerRichard BrodySirk unleashed a melodramatic torrent of rage at the corrupt core of American life—the unholy trinity of racism, commercialism, and puritanism.
- 75Miami HeraldMiami HeraldDirector Douglas Sirk keeps the precipitation from becoming too maudlin. [26 Mar 1959]
- 40The New York TimesBosley CrowtherThe New York TimesBosley CrowtherThis modernized remake of Miss Hurst's frankly lachrymose tale is much the same as its soggy predecessor. It is the most shameless tear-jerker in a couple of years.