page_title: Misery (film)
section_title: Critical response
hierarchical_section_title: Misery (film) / Reception / Critical response
caption_attribution_description: English: Actress Kathy Bates at the Giffoni Film Festival
context_page_description: Misery is a 1990 American psychological thriller film directed by Rob Reiner based on Stephen King's 1987 novel of the same name, starring James Caan, Kathy Bates, Lauren Bacall, Richard Farnsworth and Frances Sternhagen about an obsessive fan who holds an author captive and forces him to write a story.
  The film was released on November 30, 1990 in the United States. It received mostly positive reviews and was a box office success. Bates won the Academy Award for Best Actress at the 63rd Academy Awards, making Misery the only film based on a Stephen King novel to win an Oscar. King himself has stated that Misery is one of his top ten favorite film adaptations.
context_section_description: On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Misery has a 90% approval rating based on 67 reviews, with an average rating of 7.55/10; the consensus reads: "Elevated by standout performances from James Caan and Kathy Bates, this taut and frightening film is one of the best Stephen King adaptations to date." At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating to reviews, the film has a score of 75 based on 23 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A-" on an A+ to F scale.
  Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film a rating of three stars out of four, stating that "it is a good story, a natural, and it grabs us." Variety called it "a very obvious and very commercial gothic thriller, a functional adaptation of the Stephen King bestseller." Derek Malcolm of The Guardian gave it a positive review, writing that it "plays enough tricks on us so that we don't ever treat anything quite seriously and Goldman's script has enough good lines and situations to keep one interested in exactly what is coming next." and praised the cast, especially Bates, writing that her "demented devotee in Misery is inspired casting." Vincent Canby of The New York Times praised Kathy Bates' performance, calling it "a genuinely funny performance as the mad Annie, as gaudily written in Mr. Goldman's screenplay as it is in Mr. King's novel."
  King himself has stated that Misery is one of his top ten favorite film adaptations, in his 2009 collection Stephen King Goes to the Movies. In his 2000 memoir called On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, King references the movie adaptation of the book, saying:
  In the early 1980s, my wife and I went to London on a combined business/pleasure trip. I fell asleep on the plane and had a dream about a popular writer (it may or may not have been me, but it sure to God wasn't James Caan)...
  In 2003, Annie Wilkes was ranked #17 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains list.
  The "hobbling" scene in the film, in which Annie breaks Paul's ankles with a sledgehammer, was ranked #12 on Bravo's 2004 program The 100 Scariest Movie Moments.
  In 2009, Chris Eggertsen of Bloody Disgusting ranked Misery fourth place in his list of "10 Claustrophobic Horror Films".
caption: Kathy Bates' performance received widespread acclaim
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