Rolling Stone
"...Barrymore pulls you up short with a funny, sexy and surprisingly heartfelt performance..." 06/15/1995 p.88Sight and Sound
"...Barrymore's fierce angel's face is truly poignant here..." 01/01/1996 p.45-6 Entertainment Weekly
"...[Both] expectedly...and unexpectedly good performances....Enjoyably soppy..." -- Rating: B 06/02/1995 p.40 Variety
"...O'Donnell impressively meets his greatest dramatic challenge to date. Barrymore is a promising performer who improves with every film..." 05/29/1995 Los Angeles Times
"...Chris O'Donnell and Drew Barrymore soar in MAD LOVE....[Barrymore] radiates a timeless indelible star quality..." 05/26/1995 p.F14 Chicago Sun-Times
"...It is becoming increasingly clear what a good actress Drew Barrymore is....Chris O'Donnell just continues to grow..." 05/26/1995 p.39 Chicago Sun-Times 8 of 10
Mad Love is not the first story about two teenagers who fall in love against their parents' wishes. Romeo and Juliet wasn't even the first. And it's not the first movie about two troubled kids who hit the road in an attempt to run away to their dreams. But it's the first one in a while that turns realistic, and shows one of the kids trying to react responsibly when the situation gets out of hand. That makes it more interesting, because it's about real problems, not movie problems. The movie takes place in a Seattle suburb, where Casey (Drew Barrymore) is the alluring new girl in school. Matt (Chris O'Donnell) is her good-looking classmate who lives across the lake and finds his telescope trained less often on the stars than on Casey's house. He contrives a Meet Cute, and after a little awkwardness, they like each other, and before much longer, they are in love... It is becoming increasingly clear what a good actress Drew Barrymore is. In Boys on the Side, she entered the movie with the energy of a natural force and stayed around to reveal a deep emotional seriousness under her character's initial goofiness. Here, she has a couple of scenes that could have gone badly wrong - a blowup in a restaurant and a confrontation with Matt - and she plays them just right, not too dramatically or strangely, but with the right balance of bravado and fear. Chris O'Donnell just continues to grow. Actors who look like him often get cast as the school jock, but he avoids stereotyping and goes for intelligently written roles (as in Scent of a Woman). He doesn't have the showy scenes in Mad Love, but he has the crucial ones, as he plays his romantic obsession against the side of his personality that needs to care and nurture... [Mad Love] deals seriously with mental illness, and also with that overwhelming mental and physical condition known as being a teenager in love. - Roger Ebert
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