Review – Dolores Claiborne

I liked this better than I thought I would. That’s at least in part because Stephen King novels usually make such lousy movies that even a tolerable production turns out to be a treat. I must also admit that the source novel isn’t exactly one of my favorites; I like King better when he sticks to simple scares rather than exploiting serious issues such as sexual abuse of a minor. Thus my expectations were sufficiently low to make this seem like a good movie just because it didn’t suck. Kathy Bates, Jennifer Jason Leigh, David Strathairn and Christopher Plummer all do solid jobs in their roles. The highly-filtered cinematography gets overworked in spots, but otherwise the production values are quite good as well. If only other King movies could have focused so strongly on character and spent less time relying on the booga-booga shot. Mildly amusing