Molly Ringwald

“All that holds Pretty in Pink together is Molly Ringwals' charismatic normality. When the picture was shot, she hadn't yet turned eighteen, but she looks completely free of self-consciousness or affectation. The poise with which she plunks herself in front of the camera is uncanny. And this redhead goddess of the ordinary carries the movie, though she has nothing particularly arresting to do or to say. . . . Hughes hasn't bothered to provide the new Ringwald heroine--her name is Andie--with the teen-agers' slang that gave Sixteen Candles its wigginess and its snap….

“…. [Pretty in Pink is] the essence of dreamy safeness--a romantic movie for kids that their parents can approve of. Parents can dream their anxieties away when they see Molly Ringwald enshrined here as a star: the teen-age ideal. The rich kids may get drunk and hot and loose, but Andie is the opposite of trashy. She's proudly conventional….”

Pauline Kael
New Yorker, April 7, 1986
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David Ansen

“… Pretty in Pink… could plausibly be described as a Marxist "Romeo and Juliet" in which the warring clans are the haves and have-nots of a Midwestern high school. Fortunately for Hughes and director Howard Deutch, Juliet is played by the fetching 18-year-old Molly Ringwald, an actress capable of revealing adolescent angst with amazing grace…. "Pretty in Pink" is a gentle and well-meaning sketch of teen peer pressures, but its dopey, feel-good ending leaves you suspecting that what you've really been watching is Much Ado About Nothing.”

David Ansen
Newsweek, date ?