Rating: 
Summary: Hmmmm....
Review: This is a female Dead Poets Society - which should never occur as nothing can ever take the place of the original "male" poets movie.Horrific that they even tried.
Rating: 
Summary: A Good Movie To Rent
Review: Julia Roberts stars as Katherine Watson, a freethinking "Bohemian" who gets a job teaching Art History at the all girls Wellesley College. In the early 1950s, girls weren't supposed to think about an ideal career. They were expected to marry rich husbands and be housewives. Katherine Watson wants to change this way of thought and uses methods in her class to show the girls that they are free thinkers. Katherine is frowned upon by some colleagues and even a few of her own students. I'd hate to think where women would be today if women like Katherine didn't exist! The movie seems doesn't necessarily stand out as a classic, but it's good entertainment and worth the price of a rental.
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Summary: Yet another attack on the 1950s
Review: This is yet another example of Hollywood's liberal attacks on America's most popular decade. There are books written about teenagers that portray all of them as rebels that were out to destroy their parents. As a teenager (actually I was in my early 20s; I was born in 1935) in the 1950s, I came across NO ONE who had these feelings at all both in high school and college. Neither did my teenaged sisters. ANYWAY, let's look at this film: Set at supposedly idealistic Wellesley College in Massachusetts (said to be the most conservative woman's girls school) just after Eisenhower's election (America's best time period was from when Eisenhower was elected in 1952 to when Sputnik went up in October 1957), these young ladies continue to be traditional. Then this radical from Berkeley (naturally) comes and encourages them to not be traditional. Soon, the girls turn to lesbianism and sleep with all the male professors. This is vicious because it is portraying all men in the 50s as being cheaters (thanks to the Kinsey report) and all women are lesbians. Marriage is wrong. It enslaves women because women should be free and live together, not vow to love, honor and obey. This is the message this show presents. Marriage is something that is no joke. I remember the old Frank Sinatra song: "love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage since you can't have one without the other." I married my college sweetheart in 1958 and we were happily married and raised two sons until she tragically drowned ala Natalie Wood in 1982. I remarried in 1992. So steer clear of works like this and instead look at real 1950s films made by Douglas Sirk, Joshua Logan, Nicholas Ray, Billy Wilder, etc. I think you'll find those more interesting and enlightening.
Rating:
Summary: ...
Review: When movie first came out wanted to see soo bad. But i never had a chance over the Holidays. SO When it came out on DVD i was thrilled. the plot was SO bad it would go from one scene to the next and leave you totally confuesed. the dialoge was one the worst i have ever seen there was no teacher/student interaction. one of the actress.an involved Lisiban/ prostution lifestyle. and on a top of that a ton of sick sexual conversations were going on the sad part was that. they picked some wonderful actress in this movie if they just would left out those scenes and the storyline that people follow it would been much better. it was as bad as my dead grandmothers dentures!
Rating:
Summary: A waste of genuine talent
Review: Watching the trailers for this movie I didn't think it would be very good, but I was quite prepared to have my mind changed, particularly since it had such a good cast. The story is obviously taken from The Dead Poet's Society, but this time given a feminist edge. That feminist edge is Julia Roberts, a thoroughly modern miss who takes a class of art students at a conservative college, only to realise that it's really just a finishing school. There's an appropriate array of stereotypes: the nasty one (Dunst), the wild one (Gyllenhaal) and the nice one (Stiles). The greatest travesty of Mona Lisa Smile is that it wastes the talents of such brilliant actresses. It doesn't even seem to appreciate them. Roberts, showing such spark in Erin Brockavich, does good work here but she's just too modern to fit into a 50's set piece. The worst hit by it all is Kirsten Dunst, whose character seems to be repeatedly punished for refuting Roberts' feminist agenda and has some truly abysmal dialogue, especially when confronting her mother with a picture of the Mona Lisa. Julia Stiles and Maggie Gyllenhaal come out of the whole mess relatively unscathed though. Stiles has always seemed to be a good actress in need of a good film, and here is no exception. Her poise, voice and mannerisms are impressively realistic, and her talk with Roberts that maybe her feminism isn't always the right course of action is the best scene in the movie. Gyllenhaal is just wonderful. She imbues her character with an almost manic depressive quality that's not in the script. It's all her, and I can only hope that after her startling turn in Secretary that she moves on to bigger and better things. Of course, the real problem with Mona Lisa Smile is that it's too self-consciously 'worthy' and seems to be begging for an Oscar in almost every scene. Although there are a couple of scenes where the film comes alive, it's too few and far between, and once you've left the theatre and look back on it you realise what a shallow exercise it was.
Rating:
Summary: CAN YOU SAY DEAD POETS!
Review: WHEN I FIRST HEARD ONE REVEIW ON THE MOVIE THEY MENTIONED THE MOVIE "DEAD POETS SOCIETY" THAT MOVIE WAS WONDERFUL. THEN I SAW THIS ONE WELL SUCKED. I SPENT AOLMOST THREE HOURS SEEING SOMETHING COPYING A MOVIE I LIKED AND NOT VERY WELL. I LOVE A LOT OF JULIA ROBERTS STUFF. BUT SHE WAS TERRIBLE IN IT AND IT WAS A WASTE OF TIME. I DIDN'T LIKE ANY OF THE CHARACTERS AT ALL. AND IT NEVER REACHED A GOOD POINT. EVEN AT THE END WHEN KIRSTEN DUNST FINALLY COMES AROUND I WANTED TO HIT HER. THE OTHER THING IS IN "DEAD POETS" THE DAD WAS MEAN AND CRUEAL AND YOU COULDN'T PUSH HIM AROUND. IN THIS I FELT I COULD TAKE THE MOM. SHE WAS ANNOYING AND EVEN IN THE 50S YOU COULS SEE THAT. ALSO THE SPECIAL FEATURES AREN'T THAT GOOD AT ALL. IF YOU INTO THEM THEY HAE A SPACE THAT HAS TRAILERS. THEN YOU GO OUT TO THE MAIN MENU AND THEY HAVE ANOTHER SPACE THAT SAYS TRAILERS AND THEY WERE THE SAME ONES AS IN THE OTHER SPACE. THE CAST DIDN'T TALK ENOUGH ABOUT THE MOVIE BUT THEY ONLY TALKED ABOUT THE TIME PERIOD. I HATED IT AND THINK PEOPLE EVERY WHERE SHOULD BURN IT!
Rating: 
Summary: Mona
Review: A young teacher, with a boyfriend comes to a prestigious school to teach. She is intimated the first day when she meets her classmates. A bunch of girls with enormous IQ's sit in the room, dictating word for word from books. Mona teaches Art 101 and makes plans to show the girls that art is more than reading a book or seeing it just once. She takes them to look at different pieces of art detailing the masterpiece. In the day, the girls were infatuated with finding a husband so they could get married. Betty was so excited she was married, and her studying habits got worse. Betty thought she was in love, but obviously wasn't. Mona shows the girls there is more to life than just getting married. She hands an application to a girl to try to get her into Yale school of law. She applies, is accepted, but decides to get married and live her dream. The movie is inspirational and shows that women can do anything that they dream of. We are not meant to just "clean the house or wash dishes". We have brains of our own that can exceed outer limits and change the world forever. This movie gave me that feeling.
Rating:
Summary: totally inauthenic
Review: I went to a women's college in New England in the 1950s. Any resemblance between that reality and the portrayal in the movie appears to be purely accidental. The movie makers showed little knowledge of the period, apparently confusing the 1950s with the 1920s, and no knowledge of young women, women's education, or women's colleges at that time. The film is a collection of wall-to-wall, highly erroneous cliches and stereotypes (these colleges as finishing schools, which they definitely were not, intellectually impoverished, authoritarian--I could go on and on). OUCH!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst--Outstanding Performances
Review: Can two actors command a film? In this creation, Julia Roberts and Kirsten Dunst prove it can be done. Strong will personalities are portrayed by these two wonderfully convincing ladies. From the beginning, we are all introduced to Julia Roberts as Katherine Watson, a woman who plans on challenging the way life is at Wellesley, an all female school. Life is about education, ettiquette, and preparing for marriage. Katherine wants to change their outlook, their frame of minds, and their goals. In her quest in this, she sees that her goals will not be easy to come by. Then there is Kirsten Dunst as Betty who strongly believes in what she was taught in Wellesley, and overall is set against Katherine Watson. These actors' exchange is convincing and it draws you into their worlds and their two different beliefs in what women should do. There are other plots that are connected to the other characters, but overall, Julia Roberts and Kirsten Dunst carries the film with superb acting. The scenes are refreshing, showing campus life set amoung sweeping rivers, rustic landscape, wonderful skies and changing seasons. Even inside the buildings you were captured by the set up and some of the art. In conclusion, Julia Roberts was excellent, and Kirsten Dunst was amazing. They were very convincing and strong. I really enjoyed it. Maybe, you will, too. Joy.
Rating:
Summary: A worthwhile rental.
Review: This movie is...ok. Julia Roberts and her other castmates shine but that's pretty much a given. None of the characters were very well developed, except for maybe Kirsten Dunst's character. Julia's character comes from bohemian California to stuffy, snooty Wellesley College in New England, where she is initially rather put-off by the cattiness of the students and faculty on one end, then the high intellectual aptitudes of her students on the other end. I thought that in many place Julia's character stuck out like a sore thumb, in her hippie clothes and such...she looked just like she stepped from the pages of Us Weekly right into the movie. Let's remember, we're talking about 1953...not 1963. Her character is frustrated by the fact that she is dealing with some of the brightest girls she's ever met, yet their only aspirations seem to be to marry well. She's afraid that all of her students will end up with a "Mona Lisa smile", smiling on the outside, but not really happy. All in all I thought this was a neat movie, it was not well-rounded but it's unlike anything else that's out right now. Be forewarned, it is a chick flick. I have no idea who the guy is that played Julia's boyfriend from California but he was totally miscast. He looked like he was old enough to be her father, and they had absolutely zero chemistry. This made her "engagement" dilemma a little hard to feel. This movie could have been so much better, especially with such a powerhouse cast...it would have been nice to see Julia's character interact more with her students...at the end when they're all running after her crying, it's a little hard to understand why. Perhaps because she made them think like no one else had. Still, we as viewers are left guessing, because it's not made obvious in the film. This role was not a stretch for Julia, in some areas it felt like she was basically playing herself ("I figure I'll get married someday, but I'm not going to plan my life around it"...haven't I read that in People Magazine before??). The faculty members (a lesbian is thrown in there for good political correctness), the students, the music, almost everything was right on the money for this time period...except of course, for the star of the show.
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