Crimes of the Heart

Make sure to check out Criterion’s Polaroid wall, located in the Walter Reade Theater’s lobby throughout the series. For attendees on Saturday, February 14 don’t miss your chance to have your own Polaroid taken and bring it home in a special Criterion-branded envelope.

Three years before helming Best Picture Oscar winner Driving Miss Daisy, Australian transplant Bruce Beresford garnered critical acclaim for his cinematic reimagining of another Pulitzer-winning drama set in the American South. Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart (adapted for the screen by the playwright herself) unfolds across a few days in the ancestral home of the three Magrath sisters: Lenny (Keaton), the unmarried eldest daughter who has stayed behind to care for the now-ailing grandfather who raised the girls after their mother’s suicide; Meg (Jessica Lange), a glamorous aspiring singer who, having decamped to Los Angeles in pursuit of stardom, returns to her Mississippi hometown for a long-awaited visit—and a possible reunion with an old flame (Sam Shepard); and Babe (Sissy Spacek), the guileless youngest sister who sends shockwaves through the town when she shoots her husband, a local politician, in broad daylight.