Quick Review: Nobody who appreciates the art of acting can find anything negative to say about the two stars (and much of the supporting cast). Penn and Sarandon had limitations that other actors really appreciate - characters based on real-life people (a situation that constrains interpretation), the physical challenge of constantly working across from each other through a partition, and the knowledge that the audience brings a variety of attitudes to the underlying controversy of capital punishment. Tim Robbins was smart enough not to make his own anti-capital punishment point too painfully obvious by refusing to portray the murderer as an innocent and by giving the families of the murdered innocents their own identities and stories. It would have been better if he could have restrained from intercutting flashbacks of the murder with the execution scene - thereby equating both acts in what may have seemed a subtle manner to him, but was atypically obvious and out of tone with the rest of the film.
Excerpts from Patrick Stoner's interview with Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon.