The reviews are almost uniformly warm. Most critics take the film as a fair, even-handed treatment of capital punishment that refuses to argue one side, and they credit Tim Robbins, as writer and director, with a clear step up in maturity and craft from his earlier work. The praise settles on the two central performances: Susan Sarandon’s nun and, most often, Sean Penn’s condemned man, whom several reviews single out for making a repellent character human without asking us to forgive him.
The reservations are few and the spread is narrow. Some critics find the film austere to the point of coolness, and others note that its power is emotional rather than argued. The one real dissent comes from The Independent, which calls it hollow and self-conscious, well acted in its intimate scenes but more likely to confirm what viewers already think than to unsettle it.