Dolores Claiborne is a 1995 American psychological thriller drama film directed by Taylor Hackford and starring Kathy Bates, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Christopher Plummer, and David Strathairn.

[4] Dolores Claiborne was the second major King film adaptation to star Bates in a leading role after Misery (1990) five years earlier.

[6] In 1995, Dolores Claiborne works as a domestic servant for her elderly, partially paralyzed employer, Vera Donovan, in her mansion on Little Tall Island in Maine.

A flashback reveals one day when Dolores returned home from work, she told a drunken Joe she knows he stole the money and also that he molests Selena.

Dolores Claiborne was filmed in Lunenburg, Mahone Bay, Chester, Stonehurst, and Digby, all in Nova Scotia, Canada.

"[9] According to Martha McCaughey and Neal King, the film's use of flashbacks suggest a specific narrative point of view when considering the film's themes of abuse and incest between Dolores, as well as Selena and Joe: "That all the flashbacks save one belong to Dolores tells us that not only are we watching her story; it also tells us of the unavailability of the past to Selena, and of the displacement and repression forced into play by the girl's experience of incest.

Throughout this scene, the perspective offered by the camera remains firmly focused on the reactions of the victim of the sexual crime.

[12] In the book Screening Genders, one scholar considered Dolores Claiborne and Stage Door (1937) to be the only "truly feminist" films made in Hollywood, in that they "don't cop out at the end.

"[13] Britt Hayes writes of the main character, "Through Dolores, King poignantly explores the way the world often forces women into a series of compromises, and the way those small compromises have a way of stacking up to an imposing height, backing us into a corner until we have no choice but to become bitches...a woman (a wife, a mother) is emotionally and physically abused to the point where she breaks and feels she has no other option [than to become a bitch].

"[14] The three main women in the story – Dolores, Selena, and Vera – each repeat, mutatis mutandis, "Sometimes being a bitch is the only thing a woman has left to hold on to."

The site's consensus states: "Post-Misery Kathy Bates proves to be another wonderful conduit for Stephen King's novels in this patient, gradually terrifying thriller.