David Thomson

“Most intriguing of all, Plenty is a kind of aghast celebration of a woman who will not settle for popular answers about what she wants or what it is to be English. With Hare's text, and Meryl Streep's very brave performance, Schepisi showed us a woman helplessly drawn to terrible, dangerous gestures. Perhaps one needs to have been--or to have wanted to be--English to feel the movie's pain. Plenty seemed to me at first a failure, too tied to self-pity and too blurred in writing and casting. But I cannot get the film out of my head, and I'm still not sure how much of that comes from Hare, Streep, or Schepisi. My only answer so far is that there are three profound, unstable talents, drawn toward difficulty and discomfort.

David Thomson
A Biographical Dictionary of Film
Third Edition, 1994, p 671
On Fred Schepisi

“She was astounding again in Plenty…, though it was ominously clear by then that her taste was for women no one else could endure…. And A Cry in the Dark is a film that any young actress should examine.

“Is this Streep's fate--is she just an academic model? I think her depth is too great to accept failure now. But she has shown no instinct for organizing her own career….”

Thomson
A Biographical Dictionary of Film
Third Edition, 1994, pp 722-3