In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

A young woman is gang-raped in a bar. But charging the perpetrators with rape may not be a good idea because, frankly, the young woman may well have been asking for it. Does dressing and acting provocatively mean that you deserve to get raped?This film addresses the moral issues attached to rape very effectively, and features excellent performances from Kelly McGillis as the District Attorney tasked with pursuing the line most likely to meet with success, and from Oscar-winning Jodie Foster as the victim.This is disturbing stuff, but it is well written and brilliantly performed. It will leave you with considerable food for thought.

The activist group Femen protests topless. The question is does the objectification of women and attendant arousal of men viewing the protests mute the message. The Accused has the same problem. It is a film about a brutal gang rape. It is shown in detail and for a long time. It is also a film about a real rape; one who trial made a victim out of the victim and heroes out of the rapists. In the film, the story is retold with different results. The film tries to depict events as they should have been,Jodie Foster won an Oscar for her role as the victim. It was a tough role, but she made it work.The question you have to ask yourself while you watch the rape: Is is a turn-on, or can you feel the pain?

One thing I found interesting about "The Accused" - a film that's famous for the vicious rape of a young blue-collar woman - is just how they chose to go about making such a movie. You know going in that there's a bad scene, and that the rest of the movie deals with the repercussions. But the film begins immediately after the atrocity went down. We open with Jodie Foster desperately flagging down a ride to make good her escape, and flow right into the doctor's examination of her ghastly welts, claw marks and bruising. The tone is set without any on screen violence. Now, there's still a "bad scene" involved, but it doesn't happen until we've spent some time in the courtroom. It's a flashback, although the tension and foreboding have been ratcheted to obscene heights that it's still, to this day, beyond brutal (nauseating would be the better way to put it). The whole of the movie is not easy to watch, and it's one that doesn't hold a lot of replay value. But the reason to recommend it (and I'm sure it has been for 25 years) is the performances from the two leads. Both are exceptional, but Foster won that Oscar for a reason. At the center of this movie are two women who are fighting; one for her side of the story to be heard (after her character assassination in the eyes of the public), and the attorney who's out to help her find justice. "The Accused" is not as harrowing as "Leaving Las Vegas", but it's still no day at the beach. Regardless, should this movie ever come up in conversation, my recommendation will be based entirely on those performances from Jodie Foster and Kelly McGillis.7/10

The shocking true story of a bar room gang rape is lifted from the headlines to become, with dramatic license, a serious and troubling study of sexism at its worst, when the victim herself is accused of 'asking for it'. Jodie Foster offers a courageous performance as the tough but vulnerable Sarah Tobias, whose behavior on the night of the crime was certainly provocative, but as the flashback re-enactment shows all too clearly no amount of provocation could justify such a brutal response. Up until those final scenes the film is a well-crafted but largely conventional topical drama, with lots of predictable bonding between Foster and her conscience stricken attorney Kelly McGillis. But the attack itself, teasingly saved until the final reel, is so graphic and degrading it obliterates the memory of everything that happened earlier. The scene is pure exploitation, but it serves a purpose, putting audiences in the same, ugly position as the cheering onlookers in the bar, who in many ways were even guiltier than the rapists themselves.