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.
27 May 1983, Lake Arrowhead, California, USA
17 August 1979, Norwalk, Connecticut, USA
30 October 1956, Essex, England, UK
12 July 1978, New York City, New York, USA
June 14, 1977 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA
29 June 1982, New York, New York, USA
December 26, 2010
Glossy entertainment value but far from art.
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 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.
July 20, 2004
Mike Newell directs a formulaic Roberts vehicle that isn't without its charm.
December 19, 2003
Like the turtleneck cashmere sweaters and girdles that tie down these promising women, the movie is trite and trussed.
December 23, 2003
Women of the Fifties, rise up in protest.
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 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."
May 14, 2004
Mike Newell takes the road most travelled in tackling the sexual apartheid and hysteria of the 1950s.
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.
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.
