How Stella Got Her Groove Back Critic Reviews

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

Bassett's natural dramatic fierceness, so powerful when incited to action, is at odds with the knee-weakening sexual surrender required by the story.Read the full review

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like "Waiting to Exhale" except more so, film jerks from scene to scene with little sense of rhythm, continuity or dramatic shaping.Read the full review