Movie · 1996 · Drama, Romance · 1h 59m · PG-13 · English
Curator score: 2.2/10 (22.3K ratings)
Passion Brought Them Together... Only Success Could Tear Them Apart!
Overview
Tally Atwater has a dream: to be a prime-time network newscaster. She pursues this dream with nothing but ambition, raw talent and a homemade demo tape. Warren Justice is a brilliant, hard edged, veteran newsman. He sees Tally has talent and becomes her mentor. Tally’s career takes a meteoric rise and she and Warren fall in love. The romance that results is as intense and revealing as television news itself. Yet, each breaking story, every videotaped crisis that brings them together, also threatens to drive them apart...
Ratings
Curator score: 2.2/10
IMDb: 6.1/10
Letterboxd: 3.07/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 32%
TMDB: 6.3/10
Director
Jon Avnet
Production
Cinergi Pictures, Avnet/Kerner Productions
Cast
Robert Redford, Michelle Pfeiffer, Stockard Channing, Joe Mantegna, Kate Nelligan, Glenn Plummer, James Rebhorn, Scott Bryce, Raymond Cruz, Dedee Pfeiffer, Michael Laskin, Lorielle New, Miguel Sandoval, James Karen, Fabian, Dennis Dun, Noble Willingham, Brian Markinson, Robert Keith Watson, Lily Gibson
Curator Review
Verdict
A glossy 90s adult romance wrapped around TV newsroom melodrama, with strong star chemistry and a sentimental streak that still works for some viewers. It’s uneven and occasionally corny, but if you like earnest workplace romances with big emotions and a nostalgic media-industry sheen, it has enough charm to land.
Best for
fans of 90s star-driven romantic dramas
viewers who enjoy newsroom or workplace settings
people who like melodramatic, emotionally direct romances
audiences drawn to glossy studio-era adult entertainment
Skip if
you want subtle, modern romance writing
you’re allergic to earnest sentiment and soap-opera plotting
you need a tightly constructed drama with consistent tone
you dislike movies that romanticize high-pressure careers
Overview
Up Close & Personal is a very 1990s kind of romance: polished, sincere, and built around the magnetic pull of two movie stars. The newsroom setting gives it a propulsive, public-facing energy, and the film clearly wants to treat broadcast journalism as both a calling and a spectacle. When it works, that combination gives the movie a swoony, old-school appeal.
Worth noting
The problem is that the script often leans too hard on sentiment and convenience. The romance can feel overdetermined, and the career arc sometimes plays more like a fantasy of mentorship and reinvention than a believable professional rise. Still, the movie has a certain confidence in its emotional excess, and that can be part of the pleasure.
Bottom line
What lingers most is the chemistry and the glossy melancholy of the whole package. It’s not a great film, but it is a recognizable artifact of an era when adult romances were allowed to be expensive, earnest, and unabashedly romantic. If that mode works for you, this one is easy to watch through to the end.
Top Letterboxd reviews
eely (2.5★) · 183 likes
when will robert redford tame my frizzy hair and clumsy ways and shape me into a star and also have sex with me
andrea g. (4★) · 142 likes
is it robert redford's job to make journalism look so hot?
eely (2.5★) · 142 likes
me puking in a public restroom stall and robert redford coming to my rescue and picking me up off the bathroom floor and looking me in the eyes and telling me everything is gonna be alright and he’s gonna Get Me Through It is just a drunken fever dream i had once but it actually happens to michelle pfeiffer in this movie so it was nice to see my vodka fueled fantasy play out live action
Andrea (3.5★) · 93 likes
"Do you want to be with me?"
"So much it hurts. I don't want to be anywhere where I can't see you or touch you. I don't want to be anywhere where I can't hear your voice or tell you a story and see this great smile..."
This movie probably isn't great, and even less so when I read about the original story and how it was butchered, but I can't stop thinking about the way Robert Redford looks at… more