Average Rating: 4.9/10
Reviews Counted: 148
Fresh: 52 | Rotten: 96
Though Mona Lisa Smile espouses the value of breaking barriers, the movie itself is predictable and safe.
Average Rating: 5.2/10
Critic Reviews: 41
Fresh: 18 | Rotten: 23
Though Mona Lisa Smile espouses the value of breaking barriers, the movie itself is predictable and safe.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.1/5
User Ratings: 189,415
Set in 1953, Mona Lisa Smile tells the story of Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts), a new young art history professor at Wellesley College, an all-female campus with a prestigious reputation for academic excellence. Unfortunately for free-minded Berkeley grad Watson, her East Coast teaching stint comes during a less-progressive time that finds most of her students -- among them Betty Warren (Kirsten Dunst), Joan Brandwyn (Julia Stiles), and Giselle Levy (Maggie Gyllenhaal) -- more interested in
Dec 19, 2003 Wide
Mar 9, 2004
$63.7M
Sony Pictures Releasing
All Critics (158) | Top Critics (41) | Fresh (55) | Rotten (99) | 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.
Women of the Fifties, rise up in protest.
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.
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.
Like the turtleneck cashmere sweaters and girdles that tie down these promising women, the movie is trite and trussed.
Rather than being a fascinating exploration of a much more constrained time in our social history, the film simply feels anachronistic.
Glossy entertainment value but far from art.
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."
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.
Period dress, set design, manners and acting are fine--as is Mike Newell's direction. If only the script was less predictable.
...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.
Mike Newell directs a formulaic Roberts vehicle that isn't without its charm.
Mike Newell takes the road most travelled in tackling the sexual apartheid and hysteria of the 1950s.
A nice film that Julia Roberts played outstandingly.
June 23, 2011Super Reviewer
Mona Lisa Smile,which is set in 1953/54, tells the story of Katherine Ann Watson (played by Julia Roberts), a teacher who studied at UCLA graduate school who leaves her boyfriend behind in Los Angeles to teach at Wellesley College, a conservative women's private liberal arts college in Massachusetts........ she
February 5, 2008
Super Reviewer
| 35% | The Hangover Part II |
| 25% | Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Par... |
| 81% | Kung Fu Panda 2 |
| 44% | Cowboys & Aliens |
| 83% | Rise of the Planet of the Apes |
| 25% | Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Par... |
| 88% | Lady and the Tramp |
| 69% | A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas |
| 21% | Fireflies in the Garden |
| 45% | The Rebound |
What are his 10 best movies ever?
See the all-new action-packed trailer!
Five new Marvelous pictures
Unconventional Superheroes