Spanglish Reviews
Top CriticThere are signs that a lot has been cut, and in trimming his film Brooks may have squeezed too tight: his movie needs breathing space.
This is Hollywood liberal humanism as muted join-the-dots melodrama, all carefully calculated colouring, broad outlines, and no room for fruitful digression.
The film gets better as it goes along ... and all the characters, including Deborah, become more interesting and appealing as we get to know them better.
Brooks, fumbling around with too many characters and too many issues, can't find the heart of the story or give heart to the part of it he chose to focus on.
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| Original Score: 3/5
The film too often seems to be talking down, to its subjects and to its audience.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
The movie is what in Hollywood they call 'character-driven,' and it does take its sweet time. But much of that time is sweet indeed.
Offensive because it turns liberal self-abasement into self-congratulation.
Sometimes Brooks's ideas are legitimate, but his way of putting them across is dishonest. Sometimes the ideas are dishonest, but his way of putting them across is legitimate.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The movie's funny and wicked fun.
So rancid is Brooks's fury that it's clouded his judgment, so that each of his main characters is a stereotype of the most broad-brush, malodorous nature.
A performer's showcase. While the pleasantly sentimental comedy doesn't bowl you over with cinematic technique, it's likely to make audiences happy.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
There's fun to be had if you can accept Spanglish's dubious relationship to the actual universe.
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| Original Score: 2/4
An unusually observant film marked by dry, acerbic humor.
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| Original Score: 4/4
With his unerring eye for characters, even their hidden dark corners, Brooks makes Spanglish a rich blend of humor and heartbreak.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A pepperpot bubbling with pungent insights and sharp wit.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
There is no shortage of zingers (mostly delivered by Evelyn), but the film lacks credibility.
| Original Score: 2/4
You're constantly aware of how oddly these people are behaving, and the artificiality spoils the illusion.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Doesn't match Brooks' prior efforts because the characters are too broadly written.
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| Original Score: 2/4
An unusually shallow and facile work for Brooks, but the writing and the performances -- other than Leoni's -- keep us at least halfway involved.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Easy to enjoy, if you're at all susceptible to this sort of thing, but it leaves you with nothing to think about, except for all the opportunities Brooks missed to make something worthwhile out of the material.
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| Original Score: 2/4
As in most sentimental yarns, this is a flick where credible characterization is held hostage to the demands of the plot and the needs of its message.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Now here is something I thought I would never see: an intelligent movie whose most mature, thoughtful character is played by Adam Sandler.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Don't forgive its failures, just try to ignore them. And keep an eye out for Paz Vega. This woman is a movie star.
| Original Score: B-
The proceedings feel slightly washed-out -- not quite a sitcom but several observations short of a rich movie experience.
| Original Score: C
The film's deepest charms come from its ensemble's wacky chemistry and Brooks' warm appreciation of the love between parents and children.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The movie is not quite the sitcom the setup seems to suggest; there are some character quirks that make it intriguing.
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| Original Score: 3/4
One of the most humane works ever made about the lives of working mothers.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Deserves an audience because much of Brooks' writing is still strong and fresh.
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| Original Score: 3/5
It gives us ideas to chew on, moments to laugh at and performances to admire, but, like so many current lives, it is also somewhat in disarray, not always equal to its admirable intentions and the grace of its most successful aspects.
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| Original Score: 3/5
It's another movie about a dysfunctional family, but this one is different because they're original, lovable, forgivable and fascinating.
[Brooks] opts for soothing fakery and empty multicultural rhetoric to send us home feeling good about ourselves and partaking of the surplus smugness that he clearly has to spare.
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| Original Score: 2/5
Spanglish's central players are like real people touched with the perfect dose of comic exaggeration.
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| Original Score: B+
This is a deeply unpleasant movie masquerading as a heartfelt social commentary on life in these United States (or at least in the wealthy republic of Beverly Hills).
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| Original Score: D
Brooks plops moms and dads and kids in the middle of a muddled message movie, losing his characters, his wit and, worst of all, his point.
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| Original Score: 2/4
As a TV sitcom veteran, Brooks knows how to fashion a button-pushing formula. But the buttons on this board are too numerous and their prodding more conspicuously annoying.
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| Original Score: 1/4
A distressingly heartwarming domestic drama.
Spanglish isn't [Brooks'] best work, but it's infused with humor and humanity.
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| Original Score: B-
As pedestrian as its marital and parental conflicts may be, Spanglish utterly crumbles when it probes matters of cultural identity.
Short on real drama and incident and long on tedium thanks to one irredeemably neurotic central character.
No doubt about it, Brooks is solidly in charge of this feel-good fairy tale as he gets terrific performances from everyone including two super-talented child actors.
