Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Many reviewers here have said that this film is probably only worth watching if you are a Kristy McNicholl fan and that may well be true and I'll admit I have a video copy for that very reason. This is the darkest role that was played by Kristy and is in stark contrast to her earlier Tomboy roles, and that should have been a good move for her. But this movie doesn't give her enough of a chance to prove her potential."Dream Lover" shows Kristy in a light that was different from Buddy (Family) just as "Extremities" shows the late Farrah Fawcett in a darker role than those for which she was previously known. Both actresses deserved better opportunities to show the harder, grittier acting of which they were capable.For me, the best scene in the film is the one where she reacts to the experiment not being stopped at the agreed signal, and the conflicting anger and upset from the character is brilliantly shown by Kristy. I find it hard to watch, knowing what eventually happened to this young actress in her personal life and that she never got to make the movies that would have shown how powerful an actress I believe she was going to be when she was older. Watching it makes me wonder what she could have done later on. May be I am biased, as a fan, but when Kristy stopped acting that was a great loss to the movie industry. For that reason alone I would recommend watching this film if you can.

If there isn't much in this modest, sub-Hitchcock thriller worth criticizing it's only because there isn't much in it worth noticing at all. The premise is fascinating: that a drug might be used (or, in this case, abused) to block the chemical in our brains that inhibits muscular action during sleep, allowing us to unconsciously act out our dreams. But the script never aspires toward anything more than a routine psycho-thriller of curiously limited means: the film seems to have been made on two or three sparse studio sets with a very small cast, led by Kristy McNichol as the young test subject who naturally forgets to ask about an antidote. A throw away release doomed the film to a quick, easy death at the box office, which is a shame considering the far worse features being plugged that same summer, and the unsettling streak of sadism didn't help matters: most of McNichol's dreams find her a victim of rape and/or extreme violence.

Kristy McNicol is totally miscast and the ending, the one that takes place outside with the characters teetering on the edge of the skyscraper, was really bad and a groaner, but the rest of the film is pretty good. I'm not a big Pakula fan but I really like his minimalist approach to the somewhat contrived story. The look and feel of the film are my favorite part. The cinematography is excellent. McNicol's NY apartment is one of my favorites in any movie. It's so small and compact but cool. Wish I had it. The recurring dreams have a really unsettling quality to them. I'm impressed that Pakula actually went ahead and had these dream sequence be really become repetitive. I'm sure this turned off a huge portion of the audience but I thought they were really effective because they were so repetitive. The sound design during those nightmares sequences are also worth noting. The dream sequences of McNicol walking down a huge hallway were also amazing. I give the film's production design a huge 10. I wish I could give 10 to the rest of the film but can't. But even with all its faults, DREAM LOVER is a very overlooked movie.

This is a creepy little film... Kristy McNichol plays Kathy, a flautist and daddy's girl from the suburbs who is invited to join a professional jazz combo with a gig in a downtown restaurant in a big city. No sooner has she rented an apartment in town than she is attacked by a stalker, whom she kills in self-defense. Afterwards she attempts to suppress the memory of the attack and subsequently is plagued by a recurring nightmare where she relives the night of the attack. The rest of the movie deals with her relationship with a sleep researcher who uses her as a guinea pig in his experiments into the dream-life of animals. The scenes with McNichol playing flute and scatting are a little embarrassing (the movie employed technical advisors for scenes involving clinical psychology, and they could have used similar advice in the scenes with the jazz combo). Also, there's not much dramatic tension in a movie where Science is the protagonist and the only real antagonist is McNichol's lingering nightmares (in contrast with, say, "Altered States", where sound scientific theories complemented perfectly the fact that all the scientists were raving nutters). But the atmosphere is certainly unnerving and claustrophobic. The movie shifts from dream-frame to reality-frame often enough so that at the most crucial moments, you're kept guessing whether what you're seeing is real or not. Director Pakula coaxes his usual understated, naturalistic performances from all concerned. McNichol is perfectly cast as the slightly lost, sexually vulnerable young artist out on her own for the first time, and gives a great performance I've never seen her match. Her scenes with her father are affecting and pathetic. Paul Shenar is great, too, as Kathy's Dad; "Twin Peaks" fans will no doubt spend most of the film watching and waiting for the man who played Laura Palmer's possessed father to look in a mirror and see the face of Bob. To sum up: this is not one of Pakula's best movies, but definitely worth seeing--if only for the scene where McNichol meets her psychotic, and armed, self in a dream.