before, but "decided to try its luck on the big screen". Sony Pictures Classics saw a cut of the adaptation and requested permission to show it in American cinemas, releasing it on 27 September 1995. There, it was characterised as an "art-house" film, with a small niche audience. It was shown at the Toronto and Chicago International Film Festivals. Persuasion earned $56,000 in its first week of release in New York and grossed $150,000 in Los Angeles. The total US gross was $5,269,757. The film also was given a limited cinema release in Australia, Germany, and France in 1996. It was less financially successful than the popular Sense and Sensibility, which was released in cinemas several months later. The film was released in VHS format on 12 November 1996; a DVD version followed on 1 February 2000. Critical reception Persuasion at first failed to attract many reviews. This changed when Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility were released in late 1995 to great success in the UK. Their reception lifted the earlier film out of obscurity, as Austen's popularity became apparent among critics. Persuasion garnered highly positive reviews from major film critics, and the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes has since calculated a rating of 86%, which refers to the percentage of positive reviews. Caryn James of The New York Times deemed it a "critic's pick", praising "a cast completely in sync with Austen's warm but piercing style". Jay Carr of The Boston Globe highlighted Root's performance, calling it "a heart-stoppingly reticent yet glorious debut". In a contribution for The Washington Post, Desson Howe said "there's a wonderful, unhurried delicacy about Persuasion...as if everyone concerned with the production knows that, if given time and patience, Austen's genius will emerge. Thanks to assured performances, exacting direction and, of course, inspired writing, it does, in subtle, glorious ways". Writing for Entertainment Weekly, critic Ken Tucker graded the film with an "A−", saying it "should enthrall even those who haven't read" the novel. Tucker concluded that the film was "the sort of passionate yet precise comedy that reminds me why Austen remains such a vital writer". Susan Ostrov Weisser, a professor of nineteenth-century literature, called the film a "faithful parade of Austen's world", and praised Root as the film's "crown jewel" for playing a "fiercely intelligent, regretful, and frustrated Anne Elliot with subtlety and nuance". In 2008, James Rampton of The Independent