Joan Micklin Silver's Between the Lines is far more than a 1970s gang-spirit picture. A worthy successor to her Hester Street, it is the best film we have had so far on what happened to the college radicals of the 1960s….

What makes Between the Lines so telling and unexpected is [a] kind of neat generational contrast [that] is precisely what Silver and screenwriter Fred Barron … allow for and then destroy by carefully avoiding a morality play in which the tough business world administers a dose of reality to the radical young. The real focus of Between the Lines rests not with the struggle between '70s money men and '60s print men but with the internal dissolution of a once-innovative paper….

It is [the] state of restless ambivalence on the part of the Mainline staff that is grist for the pervasive humor of Between the Lines...