My experience of the film was dominated by the fact that this newspaper freebie DVD somehow omitted the subtitles. The extended flashback sequences spoken entirely in German therefore made no sense at all. Given that this dealt with the crux of the film – Sophie’s actual choice – that pretty much ruined it.
That hurdle aside, Meryl Streep is fantastic: you see and feel her pain because she's able to make it seem incredibly real. Kevin Kline is convincingly scary as her paranoid psychotic boyfriend. It was difficult to see Peter MacNicol as "Stingo" because I recognise him as the silly art-gallery villain Janosz Poha from Ghostbusters II, but he did capture the ambiguity of a character we’re unsure whether we’re supposed to like or not.
There’s something a bit lumbering and stilted about the way it’s filmed, and the flashbacks could have been cut altogether. It would have been enough just to watch Sophie telling her story. We certainly didn’t need the washed-out/sepia look applied to the concentration camp sequences. These reservations aside, it's worth seeing for Streep's performance alone.
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