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Mona Lisa Smile
In 1953, a time when women's roles were rigidly defined, free-spirited, novice art history professor Katherine Watson begins teaching conservative girls at the prestigious all-female Wellesley College to question their traditional social roles.
14 August 1959, La Jolla, California, USA
13 August 1972, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
1 November 1946, Terrace, North Carolina, USA
29 June 1982, New York, New York, USA
23 August 1928, New York City, New York, USA
23 April 1982, Manhasset, New York, USA
1976, Madrid, Spain
30 June 1980, Memphis, Tennessee, USA
May 12, 2009
Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles and Maggie Gyllenhaal furnish well-observed performances that frequently outshine Julia Roberts's reflex characterization in this female variant of "Dead Poets Society."
September 20, 2004
...would have been better served by characters with a little less formula than the paint-by-numbers projects so loved by these women of Wellesley College.
December 19, 2003
Like the turtleneck cashmere sweaters and girdles that tie down these promising women, the movie is trite and trussed.
May 14, 2004
Mike Newell takes the road most travelled in tackling the sexual apartheid and hysteria of the 1950s.
December 26, 2010
Glossy entertainment value but far from art.
July 20, 2004
Mike Newell directs a formulaic Roberts vehicle that isn't without its charm.
December 23, 2003
Women of the Fifties, rise up in protest.
October 30, 2004
Period dress, set design, manners and acting are fine--as is Mike Newell's direction. If only the script was less predictable.
December 19, 2003
Rather than being a fascinating exploration of a much more constrained time in our social history, the film simply feels anachronistic.
December 20, 2003
In terms of the gap between the movie it's trying to be and the movie it actually is, Mona Lisa Smile is in many ways indefensible. Yet for all its problems, it's satisfyingly movielike.
January 10, 2004
Roberts asks her students rhetorical questions: What makes art good or bad? Who decides? But the movie answers them as canonically as the syllabus Roberts abandons.
December 19, 2003
Anyone who's ever been moved by a teacher to dream a slightly bigger dream than his parents thought he or she was capable of achieving ought to love the film, for it gets at a truer model of teacher's inspiration.