Mona Lisa Smile (2003)

All Critics (159) | Top Critics (44) | Fresh (55) | Rotten (100) | DVD (27)

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.

January 10, 2004 Full Review

Elizabeth M. Tamny

Chicago Reader

Top Critic

Women of the Fifties, rise up in protest.

December 23, 2003

Peter Travers

Rolling Stone

Top Critic

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.

December 20, 2003 Full Review

Stephanie Zacharek

Salon.com

Top Critic

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.

December 19, 2003

Stephen Hunter

Washington Post

Top Critic

Like the turtleneck cashmere sweaters and girdles that tie down these promising women, the movie is trite and trussed.

December 19, 2003

Desson Thomson

Washington Post

Top Critic

Rather than being a fascinating exploration of a much more constrained time in our social history, the film simply feels anachronistic.

December 19, 2003 Full Review

Claudia Puig

USA Today

Top Critic

Glossy entertainment value but far from art.

December 26, 2010 Full Review

Nell Minow

Common Sense Media

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."

May 12, 2009 Full Review

Cole Smithey

ColeSmithey.com

A keen sense of how women have swam through a whole lot of repression and pain back then, to pave the way for females to breeze along through in the here and now.

May 26, 2007 Full Review

Prairie Miller

WBAI Web Radio

Period dress, set design, manners and acting are fine--as is Mike Newell's direction. If only the script was less predictable.

October 30, 2004 Full Review

Steve Crum

Kansas City Kansan

...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.

September 20, 2004

Mark Collette

Tyler Morning Telegraph (Texas)

Mike Newell directs a formulaic Roberts vehicle that isn't without its charm.

July 20, 2004 Full Review

Joe Utichi

FilmFocus

Mike Newell takes the road most travelled in tackling the sexual apartheid and hysteria of the 1950s.

May 14, 2004 Full Review

Martin Scribbs

Low IQ Canadian

• 1. Katherine Watson: I don't even want you to like it. What I want you to do is consider it.
  – Submitted by Kathy D (4 months ago)
• 1. Joan Brandwyn: Do you think I'll wake up one morning and regret not being a lawyer?
  2. Katherine Watson: Yes, I'm afraid that you will.
  3. Joan Brandwyn: Not as much as I'd regret not having a family, not being there to raise them. I know exactly what I'm doing and it doesn't make me any less smart. This must seem terrible to you.
  4. Katherine Watson: I didn't say that.
  5. Joan Brandwyn: Sure you did. You always do. You stand in class and tell us to look beyond the image, but you don't. To you a housewife is someone who sold her soul for a center hall colonial. She has no depth, no intellect, no interests. You're the one who said I could do anything I wanted. This is what I want.
  – Submitted by Nadia N (8 months ago)
• 1. Betty Warren: Not all who wander are aimless. Especially not those who seek truth beyond tradition, beyond definition, beyond the image.
  – Submitted by Nadia N (8 months ago)
• 1. Betty Warren: Look at this, mother. She's smiling. Is she happy?
  2. Mrs. Warren: The important thing is not to tell anyone.
  3. Betty Warren: She looks happy, so what does it matter?
  – Submitted by Nadia N (8 months ago)
• 1. Katherine Watson: It says here you're pre-law. What law school do you want to go to?
  2. Joan Brandwyn: I hadn't really thought about it. I always thought that after graduation I'd get married.
  3. Katherine Watson: And then?
  4. Joan Brandwyn: And then... I'd be married.
  5. Katherine Watson: You can do both.
  – Submitted by Moe J (10 months ago)
• 1. Joan Brandwyn: She is too old for him.
  2. Giselle Levy: No, she is too smart for him.
  – Submitted by Adya R (23 months ago)

There are no discussion threads for Mona Lisa Smile yet.