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Mona Lisa Smile
That woman, Catherine Watson, is trying to lead a new ambition. Kathryn graduated recently from the University of California, then hired to teach the history of real art at Wellesley's prestigious Women's College in 1953. Catherine is determined to confront the old and seemingly uninspiring traditions of the community, attracting her traditional students including Betty and A new and exciting challenge to the spread of meaningful art.
13 May 1978, Brooklyn, New York, USA
13 August 1962, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
16 December 1981, Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, USA
2 January 1937, Erdington, Birmingham, England, UK
22 August 1963, Newton, North Carolina, USA
30 October 1956, Essex, England, UK
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.
May 14, 2004
Mike Newell takes the road most travelled in tackling the sexual apartheid and hysteria of the 1950s.
July 20, 2004
Mike Newell directs a formulaic Roberts vehicle that isn't without its charm.
December 26, 2010
Glossy entertainment value but far from art.
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
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.
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."
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
Like the turtleneck cashmere sweaters and girdles that tie down these promising women, the movie is trite and trussed.
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.
December 23, 2003
Women of the Fifties, rise up in protest.
