Rating: 
Summary: A marvelous, must see!
Review: A Female version of Dead Poet Society, Mona Lisa Smile explores the inner struggle between reality and appearance. Truly a marvelous film. Julia Robert proves once again why she is one of the most beloved actresses. She radiates genuinity and life in her role as a liberal teacher in a conservative school.
Mona Lisa Smile is a simple film, focused mostly on story-line and acting-- echoing the impact and sentiment of the classics. Perhaps to truly appreciate this film, one must do as Julia Roberts instructs her students-- "See past the paint... let us open our minds to a new idea."
Rating: 
Summary: Julia is like a warm bubble bath -- nice, but not exciting.
Review: Mona Lisa Smile is a movie with some heart. I say *some*, in the sense that it won't get your pulse racing with either joy or outrage, but it does have a steady pace. It is a thoughtful story about young women finding themselves and developing true friendships in an era when they were not valued beyond their marriages by the rest of society. Julia Roberts plays a fledgling Art History instructor in her first year at Wellesley College. This is the 1950s, so her somewhat "Bohemian" politics become a source of controversy to the staff of that conservative school as well as the elitist parents of the all-female student body (personally, I didn't quite buy that angle to Julia's character; she's just too warm and sweet to pull it off).But the girls love her, as she cares about their lives and takes the time to counsel them as individuals. Meanwhile, she has romantic entanglements of her own to sort out and is finding her own way in life even as she helps her students to find theirs. Ironically, although Julia Roberts is the lead, there are some much more outstanding performances by Julia Stiles and Kirsten Dunst. I enjoyed the somewhat nostalgic look back at the '50s styles and the feeling of innocence in those times. The students and their instructors face realistic life challenges in this story - what will I do with my life, who am I, what is true love, and when am I really a grownup? - that we can all relate to. These are the best reasons to see this movie from my point of view. The paranoia of communism and the general oppression of that decade are also explored, perhaps a bit much in my opinion. Marriage is presented as detrimental to the freedom and individualism of the women who get "trapped" into it. There is a statement being made by this story, which practically shouts itself at the audience "Isn't it great that women's rights have come so far since then?!?" Yes, indeed it is great that we have so many more choices now. I just wish the feminist agenda wasn't so heavyhanded, so obvious here. So, go see this movie for the warm look back at America's last days of innocence and politically correct conservativism. See it because you like stories of young women coming of age. Expect to have a nice time with no huge highs or lows emotionally.
-Andrea, aka Merribelle
Rating:
Summary: SOLID 3 STARS
Review: Maybe director Mike Newell was at a Hollywood cocktail party starring Julia Roberts and through bleary-eyes decided that a movie should be made about her "Mona Lisa smile." But Roberts doesn't have a Mona Lisa's smile. Leonardo DaVinci painted Mona Lisa's smile as subtle, enigmatic, and mysterious, suggesting some secret knowledge just below the surface. Roberts' smile is wide and toothy, projecting a warm personality that bubbles right over the surface. Not that one's better than the other. Rather, to say that Roberts' persona, and especially her smile, is like Mona Lisa's is contrived. Alas, I apologize for beginning with a digression. MONA LISA SMILE, keeps trying to make connections that just aren't there. Roberts stars as Katherine Watson, fresh out of graduate school and a new art-history professor at the prestigious, conservative Wellesley women's college in 1953. "Liberal," Berkeley-educated Katherine hopes to teach future feminist leaders at the elite college. But instead she finds that Wellesley is full of smart, young women preparing themselves for high class marriage. Katherine encounters four girls who represent the various stereotypes the movie decides to explore: Snobby legacy student Betty (Kirsten Dunst) is prim, proper and about to be married. Bad girl Giselle (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who's from a broken home, and she has affairs with professors and married men. Intelligent Joan (Julia Stiles) is on the marriage track, too, but harbors secret ambitions to attend law school. And chubby Connie (excellent newcomer Ginnifer Goodwin) is a cello-playing loser who can't get a date. So that's the cliché team. Predictably, Katherine's art history class doesn't take too kindly to this unconventional new teacher, who dares exposing them to modern (i.e., contemporary) art and modern feminist notions. Predictably, they soon warm to her, teaching her as much as she teaches them. It's the DEAD POETS SOCIETY -- or the PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE (now, THAT was a film) formula. Yet these weren't the only movie to feature an inspirational teacher imparting life lessons into her students. Althoough Roberts had been miscast as the feminist iconoclast and her miscast smile is only the tip of the iceberg, the supporting cast is strong, even though Dunst goes a little overboard on her upper-crust accent. Director Mike Newell tries to make a deep movie that challenges the social standards of the 1950s. But all he manages to do is throw some stereotypes up against other stereotypes. This produces a film that feels afraid to commit to a strong point of view or philosophy, wandering through several plot lines to a dissatisfying conclusion that's more like an afterthought. A big part of the movie's problem is in throwing around big words like "subversive" and "progressive" to describe Katherine without ever getting her to convincingly demonstrating those qualities. What's next, Mike? DaVinci's LAST SUPPER starring your pal Mel Gibson?
Rating: 
Summary: this is NOT "the prime of Miss Jean Brodie"
Review: Despite the fact that both of them have won Academy Awards fro Best Actress, Julia Roberts cannot hold a candle to Maggie Smith in her portrayal of Katherine Watson, a progressive art history teacher to a gaggle of largely unlikable girls in 1953 Massachusetts. Kirsten Dunst is supposed to be the traditional Wellsley girl, of the right family and engaged to the right fiancee. She doesn't have to do anything any teacher tells her to, and the school approves of this behavior. If this was "Miss Brodie", Julia Roberts would be screaming "ASSASSIN! ASSASSIN!" after her down the hallway. But despite all the trite examinations of feminism and art ---
(look at the painting, girls! what do you FEEL???) --- the movie ends in the way of typical wishy-washy modern film with everyone loving her in the end. This is especially in a movie with Julia Roberts in it (who doesn't evoke anything of the 1950s era in which she is supposed to live, unlike the other teachers, and is frankly very hard to understand -- is she gargling something half the time???) this is just bad and distasteful.
Rating: 
Summary: Julia Roberts is a pleasure to watch
Review: MONA LISA SMILE has been sitting on a pile of DVD's I have been meaning to watch for months, but kept being tossed aside for titles which were more appealing. My impression before seeing this movie was that it would be about a teacher at a girl's school and would be full of cliches. However, the movie is so much better than that. This concretes the fact that we shouldn't judge a book by its cover. Julia Roberts (love her or hate her) demonstrates why she is one of the most loved screen actresses of our time. WHen she feels emotions, you feel them right along with her. Forget "Pretty Woman", this is the mature Julia Roberts I am talking about. There are a few cliches, but it is set in the 1950s when alot of 'what women should and shouldn't do' aspects were prominent. Women were expected to get married and have children and toss away any thought of a career. Julia Roberts character challenges that idea. Kirsten Dunst and Marcia Gay-Harden, among others, form an excellent supporting cast. One of the better films of 2003.
Rating:
Summary: Another Julia picture that's more on the smile side
Review: The 1950's--a time of growth and prosperity in the US, but the Cold War had jump-started immediately after World War II. Mona Lisa Smile is set in 1953, the time of the McCarthy hearings, I Love Lucy, and though not mentioned, the execution of the Rosenbergs. Keeping up with the Joneses thus meant a time to conform to the conservative ideology of economic prosperity, where Victorian values regarding women had made something of a comeback. Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts is a bastion of conservatism, and into this, from California, enters a new art history instructor, Katherine Watson. She is a progressive person, and isn't too keen on the rigid curriculum, but she better watch out, lest she be cut down in one of the school editorials written by Betty Warren. A warning shot comes to her when Amanda Armstrong, the college nurse and boarding house mate, a lesbian, is dismissed for the harmless and progressive act of distributing contraceptives. After a disastrous first day (imagine a class where everybody's Hermione Granger), Watson decides to shift the emphasis of her class to modern art, such as abstracts, culminating in an outing where she shows them a Jackson Pollock. She tries to tell the students that conforming to the roles defined for them by Cold War culture is a dull, unfulfilling future of servitude. The point of college is to enrich oneself, not a waiting room where one waits to find a husband and thus become entrapped. Thus modern art represents the new era, a new way of defining art, such as "is it art?" or "who determines what is art?" which translates to "is this fulfillment" or "who determines what is expected of women?" However, her progressive views aren't taken too well by the head of the college and she is told to tone down her liberal teaching methods. And this also hits in the classroom in her conflicts with Betty, someone all too eager to conform to the woman's life of getting married as the good housewife and bearer of children. It's the students as well as Watson who play a central role in the film. Giselle is the most interesting and most liberated of all the students. She has affairs with many men, including an instructor and even her analyst. At one point, during the marital etiquette class, she makes a wisecrack that makes it clear she doesn't take conventional life seriously. Another who has promise is Joan, an A student who protests getting a C by Watson. Jo wants to go to Yale and study law, hoping she can squeeze in the one slot available to women every year. The banality of conformism comes through in the Paint By Numbers sets, where one fills in the colours and can draw their own Van Gogh, ironic as Van Gogh's art defied convention. Another subtle hint of the old school being dragged kicking in screaming into the postmodern age is the "Istanbul" number, where the lyrics state how the good old days are missed when Istanbul used to be Constantinople. The way the old fogies are portrayed here, I was surprised they didn't long for the days when it was Byzantium! I rolled my eyes at the roles Julia Roberts was in following her Oscar win in Erin Brockovich, but Mona Lisa Smile proves she's back on again. Chalk this up with her better vehicles such as Pretty Woman and Notting Hill.Of the students, Maggie Gyllenhall shines out as Giselle, followed closely by Julia Stiles as Joan. What comes out here is a movie showing women who are brave enough to defy convention despite fears of ostracization and do something else in a frightening Cold War America.
Rating:
Summary: Late, but Fashionably So
Review: I went in to this with a desire to like it and a belief that I wouldn't, and I was pleasantly surprised. Though the concept seems a little outdated (shouldn't this have come out 30 years ago?), the strong cast kept up my belief that it was dealing with timely issues. Indeed, I think the movie had less to do with the idea that women need to be able to pay for a room of their own and more to do with the need for greater sisterhood and the ways that women keep each other from succeeding, which was definitely put across more subtly. The fact that it had a really good cast certainly helped it out. Kirsten Dunst played the perfect b****, Julia Stiles the overachiever, and Maggie Gyllenhaal the s*** with a heart of gold, and though their plot lines were, for the most part, predictable, they carried their characters well and convincingly. I liked Julia Roberts a lot more in this movie than I usually do, though her desire for support from Dominic West seemed both anachronistic with the ideas of the movie and something of a head scratcher. Marcia Gay Harden played the saddest role in the movie very well if a little broadly, and even Tori Amos made a surprise appearance. Unfortunately, it was just a little bit unsatisfactory, perhaps because it reckoned back to such Goliaths as To Sir, With Love and, of course, Dead Poets Society, and failed to provide anything particularly new besides an all female cast. Still, it was better than it was made out to be, and its message was perhaps more timely now than it would have been 10 years ago. 7 out of 10.
Rating: 
Summary: review for movie only
Review: i rented this movie thinking that it would be the perfect chic flick movie to settle me into the weekend. i knew not to expect an intelligent movie, but i very disappointed. horrible movie. pretty actresses without much of a plot to deliver. if you want to waste two hours, this is a good, albeit unbeneficial, way to do it. no direction to this movie whatsoever. i was left wondering, so this is it? it's pure fluff. i'm sorry, i'm not a genuine movie critic, but i'm telling you as a regular, everyday, just-want-to-watch-a-movie-to-relax, kind of person- this movie is pointless.
Rating:
Summary: She's smiling, but it's about what is behind her eyes
Review: First I just want to say that I am disgusted with some of the reviews on here. Malebashing? Like the stories of betrayal and affair in this film aren't true?! Please! Back in the 1950s, women were expected to get married, raise a family & never be themselves. They were all raised to live the lives they were born to live. The cast in Mona Lisa Smile did a superb job. I found all their performances to be flawless. I really enjoyed the stories being told here & the message that this movie gives. I think anyone especially in today's times can take the advice given in this movie. Don't do what other people expect you to do, because then you'll just be lying to yourself. Live your life, be who you are. Do what you want to do with your life. Now I won't summarize the plot of the movie as it's already written on Amazon, I will just say that the movie was consistent and enjoyable throughout its entirety. It really makes you think. When Mona Lisa smiled, was she actually happy? To quote Kirsten Dunst in the film, "Not everything is as it seems." Rent this movie or buy it...you'll enjoy it. It's a great story, fun to watch & is even motivational.
Rating:
Summary: Flawed but Still Entertaining
Review: I really wanted to like this movie much more than I did, although I think there were several inspired performances which raised the movie from ho-hum to somewhat better than average. The biggest problem with the movie was that it has been done before, and much better: "The Dead Poet's Society" and "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" are two movies that instantly leap to my mind. In my opinion, the movie emphasized the wrong characters: the young women played by Kristen Dunst and Julia Stiles were far less interesting than the Maggie Gyllenhaal and Juliet Stevenson characters (the Stevenson character left the movie far too early). The marriage vs career script was for the most part uninspiring and ho-hum. The characters, except for Gyllenhaal and Dunst, were pretty much divided up between all good and all bad; Dunst's mother was a stock villain who seemed straight out of that classic of the early 1960s, "A Summer Place." The outstanding performances of the movie were turned in by Julia Roberts and Marcia Gay Harden, playing women totally opposite from each other who became friends of sorts. Ms Harden did an excellent job of portraying a woman so scared of living that she would rather stay home to watch a game show on televison than go out for a night on the town with the friend who would soon be leaving forever. That scene neatly forshadowed the rest of the characer's life, hunkering down to protect herself from the world. Roberts performance was vastly underrated: it will be a long time before I forget how skillfully she portrayed the humiliation her character felt when tormented on her first day in the classroom by her students. More bonus material on the DVD would have been welcome, but this seems to be getting to be fairly standard for regularly priced DVDs.
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