Metacritic reviews

That could have been a good movie, but predictable. Mike Nichols' Silkwood is not predictable.... We realize this is a lot more movie than perhaps we were expecting.

Mike Nichols, in his first venture into movies since "The Fortune," elicited superlative performances from the actors, particularly Streep and stage veteran Sudi Bond.

Fueled by Meryl Streep's performance in the title role, energized by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen's script and tempered by Mike Nichols' understated direction, Silkwood is a brilliant movie that puts art above polemics, and the facts above speculation. [14 Dec 1983]

A very fine biographical drama.

Silkwood is a friendly, kooky and caring film. [09 Dec 1983]

Silkwood is a very moving work about the raising of the consciousness of one woman of independence, guts and sensitivity.

Wonderful performances steal the show in this film based on the real life of Karen Silkwood, a worker in a plutonium factory in Oklahoma, whose health and safety concerns prompt her public exposure of the company's practices which, in turn, lead to dire personal consequences.

Despite the drawbacks of the Silkwood screenplay, written by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen, this is a directorial triumph for a filmmaker who has artistically matured during his absence from the screen these past several years.

Little remains in this true-life story of a nuclear worker's mysterious death other than some prefab antinuke, profeminist rhetoric - soft-pedaled, thankfully, but still strong enough to testify to the basic smugness of the project.

There is none of the affectionate respect for working-class life and values that marked the similar, and far superior, "Norma Rae," nor any of that film's sense of felt reality either.