How Stella Got Her Groove Back Critic Reviews

Stella may be frothy and paper-thin, but it's also another great success for star Angela Bassett, who transforms the film into an infomercial for her considerable abilities. Read the full review

Whether you regard Stella's getting her groove back as a feminist battle cry or as a silly wish-fulfillment fantasy, the movie delivers guilt-free escapism about pretty people having wicked-hot fun in pretty places.Read the full review

For once, with How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Hollywood offers a love story that concentrates on the simple nuances of the romance rather than smothering us in an overly- melodramatic narrative featuring old boyfriends, jealousy, and hard-to-swallow misunderstandings. Read the full review

The movie, adapted by Terry McMillan from her semi-autobiographical novel, is pointedly boundary-breaking in its positive portrayal of a May-September relationship between a younger man and an older woman.Read the full review

How Stella Got Her Groove Back tries its best to turn a paperback romance into a relationship worth making a movie about, but fails.Read the full review

A glossy, attractive, ultimately empty soap opera that -- despite being based on a true story -- never seems remotely plausible.Read the full review

Director Kevin Rodney Sullivan, a television veteran making his feature film debut, has fluffed up this undemanding material much as one would a pillow. But pillows have their place and so do girlfriend movies.Read the full review

I'm not denying that a 40-year- old woman might be self-conscious about going around with someone this young. But the subject isn't interesting or provocative enough to sustain an entire movie.Read the full review

Buffed and waxed to within an inch of its life, Stella registers as more of a sequence of slick commercials than an actual drama. Read the full review