Pauline Kael

“The role of the ignorant Sally, a back-country girl from Saskatchewan who hopes to work her way to Monte Carlo, is essentially that of Gabrielle in The Petrified Forest, and, for once, Susan Sarandon’s googly-eyed, slightly stupefied look seems perfect. She doesn’t rattle off her lines in her usual manner; she seems to respond to the freshness and lilt of the dialogue. In Malle’s last film, Pretty Baby, she was mysteriously beautiful when she was posing nude for photographs, but she gave an inexplicably petulant and vapid performance; she did so much ruminating she was cowlike. Susan Sarandon has come through in strange circumstances, though; the permutations of her rattle provided the sprightliest momentsof The Other Side of Midnight. Maybe she seems so skillful here because this is the best part she’s ever had on the screen. Her double takes are very delicate; she keeps you tuned in to her feelings all the time….

“The casting is superb, and each time a performer reappears you look forward to what he’s going to do this time….”

Pauline Kael
The New Yorker, April 6, 1981
Taking It All In, pp. 176-177

Stanley Kauffmann

“…. Sarandon is the only one in the cast worth mention: she has a combination of 19th-century beauty and contemporary tacit humor and feeling that makes me hope she’ll get a good script some day. But she and all the others her are only capital-C Characters, collections of characteristics and oddities, presumably colorful, unrelated to life as we know it or want to know it.

“The film was directed by the Frenchman Louis Malle, fresh form the disaster of Pretty Baby [three years prior!], in which Sarandon was also wasted….”

Stanley Kauffmann
The New Republic, April 18, 1981

Andrew Sarris

“….Amid all the hollow rehetoric and false posturing of so many of the films at the Venice Festival, the creative mixture of shrewdness, vulnerability, and sensuality that went into the Sarandon and Lancaster performances, and into the zany supporting roles of Michel Piccoli … and Kate Reid …, camae as a breath of fresh air. With the help of Michel Legrand’s music, the film eventually dances its way across the Boardwalk of Atlantic City through the interlocking destinies of characters caught in the spell of Monopoly money fluttering in and out of their lives. I would never have expected it of Malle and Guare, but there it is: Atlantic City is a cinematic poem transported with classical grace through modernistic sensibilities…. I would prefer to let it sneak up upon you unawares, but the odds are you would probably never go to see this marginal offshore production with its offbeat cast. There is not enough built-in star-power and modishly misanthropic hooplah built into the project. It is a movie of middle-range talents in top form, like Carny and The Competition and Return of the Secaucus Seven, and these kinds of movies need all the help that conscientious reviewers can give them.

“…. [T]he movie’s cynicism and street-smarts never sour the romance elements in the lead characterizations….”

Andrew Sarris
Village Voice, April 1-7, 1981

"Susan Sarandon is grossly underrated. She is the heart and guts of Atlantic City—Burt Lancaster is just the frosting on the cake. But it is too much to expect that the Academy can ever get beyond the obvious.”

Sarris, March 9, 1982

Stephen Schiff

“It’s a rather slight story, really, and a bit precious. Each character is accorded a dream or delusion … The dreams are symmetrical. Lou’s balances Sally’s; he idealizes her into the classy beauty evey kingpin longs for, and she imagines him as the wordly gent who can initiate her into the good life….

“I suppose the tone of Atlantic City is what one would call ‘stagy,’ and stagy is stagy is something a movie ought never be. And yet in this one, most of what should be wrong turns out to be quite right….

“Likewise, the film is miscast, and yet perfectly so…. And Susan Sarandon has her usual problem. One of the wittiest, most intelligent actresses in Hollywood, she keeps getting cast as a cow-eyed dummy, and you can always spot the disparity. Sarandon doesn’t live inside her characters, she sees through them; her slack jaw and nasal line readings appear feigned. In Atlantic City, she’s never convincing as a vacant bunny who doesn’t know which fork to use. But it’s hard to credit the dreams of a dunce anyway, and so one is grateful that Sarandon’s Sally seems smarter than Guare has written her.”

“Stranger still is the performance of Burt Lancaster….”

Stephen Schiff
The Boston Phoenix, April 21, 1981

David Denby

“Atlantic City, an elegy for losers … is sweet, funny, and affectionate, but there’s not much narrative or poetic drive in it….

“In the apartment next to lou lives Sally (Susan Sarandon), a selfish, hustling waitress at an oyster bar, not terribly bright; eager to hang on to any man who can help her get ahead. A refugee from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan…, Sally is a common-place goddess—a shallow bitch transformed into divinity by the adoring eyes of Lou….

“…. All the characters are limited to their one idea—they are walking idées fixes….

“…. Guare sets up comic situations … but Malle deson’t seem to find the laughs in them. Instead he falls into trances over Susan Sarandon: That golden chest is unveiled three times, and the camera stays in close, scene after scene, as she charmlessly tries to act avid, lost, and dumb. Visually, the whole movie is mediocre…. The only thing I really enjoyed was Burt Lancaster’s performance….

David Denby
New York, April 6, 1981

Postscript. In Tempest a year later, Sarandon is again “an ordinary goddess”, but here it’s a compliment; “she’s lovely and soft, tanned and spectacularly full-bodied; she’s the earthiest of comediennes…” New York, August 16, 1982

David Thomson

“It is the great advantage of actresses that they are not trusted to carry films. They are not the figureheads of insolent aggression. Of course, that means that women are often the meek bystanders waiting to be rescued, patronized, and accepted by the triumphant men. On the other hand, actresses do sometimes find themselves in movies where a group of people interact, share, challenge and maneuver. And if some actresses thrive on the environment and situation of their films, it is because they do not have to bother with that great fantasy of being alone.

“In the case of Susan Sarandon, it begins to define her talent to describe exactly how she is with others: … in Dead Man Walking…, … in Thelma & Louise…, interacting with Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City so that the dreams of two people may dance together for awhile without stepping on anyone’s toes; … in Lorenzo’s Oil…, … in Bull Durham ….”

David Thomson
Movieline, November 1996