Furniture moving by itself -- click here to watch scene

 

Stephen Schiff

“The movie's best actors remind one of the sunny, unpretentious portrayals in Close Encounters and Jaws, especially Jobeth Williams, who, with her crinkly grin and her ambling, shrugging grace, pulls out all the stops. When the film is goofy and likable, so is she. But when the creatures take her baby, she becomes motherhood transfigured, and though her wailings and pleadings are almost too showy, she moves you. In one scene, she senses the spirit of Carol Anne passing through her like a wave, and as her air blows in some phantasmal wind, she cries, "I felt her … I can smell her … She went through my soul!" She knows she's talking nonsense, but Williams plays the scene with a glow that convinces us nothing else matters: this woman has just felt something extraordinary, and she's felt it with every atom of her being.

As Steve, hulking Craig T. Nelson is, in a quieter way, almost as good. And there's a striking and amateurish yet apt performance by a dwarf named Zelda Rubinstein, who has the crowd-pleasing role of a psychic as spooky as the ghosts she's gunning for….

Stephen Schiff
Boston Phoenix, June 15, 1982

Pauline Kael

“…. [Y]ou know that Diane and Steve will battle any evil spirits to bring Carol Anne back. These parents love their kids so much that no harm can come to them. JoBeth Williams makes Diane a cool, jazzy mother, and you develop real affection and respect for … Craig T. Nelson as an actor….

“…. Zelda Rubensten … [is] so fresh a peformer that you want to applaud her exit line. It seems remarkably ungallant--and clumsy--of Spielberg to press on with plot developments that undercut the conviction she has brought to her role, which is about the only solid thing in the picture….

Pauline Kael
New Yorker, date?
Taking It All In, 352-353

Molly Haskell

“Poltergeist is the less sentimental and, for me, more powerful film [than E.T.]…. But more majestic than anything in either film is the moment when Jobeth Williams's marvelously dippy and endearing child-mother turns into a woman who will move mountains to retrieve her lost child.”

Molly Haskell
Playgirl, September 1982

get also Haskell's year-end comment