Metacritic reviews

The movie contains Jane Fonda's first big-screen appearance since On Golden Pond (1981); if she doesn't quite find a character in Martha, she is nonetheless riveting. Anne Bancroft, too, is impressive. Finally, though, it is Meg Tilly who makes the movie live. Her performance, which works on both realistic and symbolic levels, allows you to believe in the story.

Though the plot has some annoying holes, the dialogue and the performances are excellent.

Splendidly shot by Sven Nykvist and with excellent performances, it's an agreeable puzzle which doesn't, thank heaven, come up with a solution to the meaning of life.

What`s lacking is a clear conception on Jewison`s part as to what this film is about.

Fonda’s relentless interrogating, mannered chain-smoking and enforced two dimensionality cause her to become tiresome very early on. She remains a brittle cliche of a modern professional woman. Bancroft gives a generally highly engaging performance as a religious woman too knowledgeable to be one-upped by even the craftiest layman.

The material itself, thoroughly unsurprising on the stage, is if anything even more so on the screen.

Tedious and contrived.

Agnes of God offers little besides its jury-rigged suspense. Oh, there are oodles of cigarette jokes -- Livingston is a chain smoker, Mother Miriam a reformed one -- till you wonder why the acknowledgment to Benson & Hedges in the closing credits didn't come above the title.

Despite all the anguished huffing and puffing, there isn't a single authentic moment in it, and all you're left with in the end is the fading memory of two overscaled, Oscar-bait performances.

It considers, or pretends to consider, some of the most basic questions of human morality and treats them on the level of "Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Old Convent."