Critics reviews

A very funny, warm movie, its gentle surfaces and lighthearted mood making for a pointed contrast to the grimness of its subject matter. Here's a film about desperation, chemical dependency and neurosis that isn't punishing, gritty or unhinged. Despite the hot mess that is her life, Suzanne remains a largely functional figure, and this portrait of addiction feels a lot more truthful than the unrelentingly dank, terrifying visions with which cinema usually presents us.

Carrie Fisher has filled her autobiographical script with choice one-liners and her trademark sensibility for observing life askance... Postcards is a rare example of a film that wouldn't be [funnier...] with more rapid-fire actors. A more intricate style wouldn't add much—and besides, at zero cost, the DP is already having fun moving Streep around the foregrounds, middle-grounds, and backgrounds of his shots, and she mines different kinds of comic gold depending on where she is: a miracle.

If the satire in [Working Girl and Postcards from the Edge isn't] as sharp as The Graduate or Carnal Knowledge, Nichols' ability to bring surprising performances from his cast remained... Gene Hackman almost steals Postcards as the veteran director who delivers some hard won wisdom to Meryl Streep's drug sodden character. Postcards‘ film-within-a-film opening was also a sly nod to those in the audience wondering where Nichols the stylist had gone.

Nichols's direction makes a very old-fashioned and effective Hollywood entertainment out of it, with Meryl Streep at her best in the Fisher part, Shirley MacLaine equally fine as her show-biz mother... Among the pleasures to be found here are some amusing sidelong glances at how movies get made and the singing talent of Streep as well as MacLaine. There's not much depth here, but Nichols does a fine job with the surface effects, and the wisecracks keep coming.

Postcards From the Edge is alive only when it's being as mean and vicious as its little heart can be, which is more than often enough.

In this era of postverbal cinema, Postcards proves that movie dialogue can still carry the sting, heft and meaning of the finest old romantic comedy.