Metacritic reviews

Out of Africa is a great movie to look at, breathtakingly filmed on location. It is a movie with the courage to be about complex, sweeping emotions, and to use the star power of its actors without apology.

Out of Africa is, at last, the free-spirited, fullhearted gesture that everyone has been waiting for the movies to make all decade long. It reclaims the emotional territory that is rightfully theirs.

Out of Africa is still an absolute knockout. It provides such an enchanting glimpse of the paradise that Dinesen tragically lost that audiences will completely understand her other grand passion for Africa itself.

Ultimately this is a film of rare and pleasing smoothness—Hollywood as it was meant to be.

Meryl Streep is back in top form. This means that her performance in Out of Africa is at the highest level of acting in film today. Also, since she is Streep, it means that a return to form is not a return: she has realized a character utterly different from any she has done before.

This good and gentle film, directed by Sydney Pollack (Tootsie), might have been fashioned to make the most of Streep's natural qualities of independence, humor and sophistication (bordering on snobbishness) and her exciting suggestion of untrustworthiness.

It`s a shame to have to knock the otherwise beautiful and haunting picture, but when you`re watching a love story and you can`t stand the character who is being loved, that makes for a very frustrating movie-going experience.

Just as the film captures a world (Imperialism, hunting, colonialism) that has faded away, so this film feels like one of the last of it's kind.

It's big, beautiful, and imposing. But there isn't much to it, and pretty pictures -- replacing ideas, not supporting them -- are its only real attraction.

Unfortunately, and through no fault of Meryl Streep, there doesn't seem to be enough electricity generated out there in Africa to power a love story 2 1/2 hours long.