review for It's My Turn on AllMovie

It's My Turn (1980)
by Craig Butler review

The law of diminishing returns had set in by the time Jill Clayburgh starred in It's My Turn, a film that seems to be a descendant of her earlier (and much better) An Unmarried Woman and Starting Over. None of these films were actually sequels, but Clayburgh's presence -- and the fact that her character in each one seemed to be a stand-in for the "modern woman" of the time -- makes them feel like part of a trilogy. The difference is that the two earlier films were subtler in their approach; there was a social commentary at the core of each film, but it was couched in an involving story with interesting characters. In Turn, the commentary seems to have been grafted onto a fairly traditional romance with characters that are fairly shallow; we've seen them all before, even if their words and phrases may have been slightly different. As a result, Turn feels a bit clichéd and manipulative, and modern audiences will also find it amusingly dated. Still, the creators have approached the work with adequate skill; the result is not great drama, but it's an enjoyable, plastic little romance, complete with the required big scene for the star to show her acting chops.