Good story, Not enough for a whole film

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

Disappointing to say the least. Given all the talented performers, this could've and should've been a whole lot better. The writing was sub-standard ( too many 'what are you doing heres?), references to California, and not the greatest dialogue. Also, a few anachronisms undermined the film as well. The acting was good overall and saved the movie from zero stars. LJM

A new teacher who comes in and changes the students' outlooks on life is a common theme in movies. "Conrack", "Stand and Deliver" and Mr. Holland's Opus" are examples. "Mona Lisa Smile" continues this motif. Julia Roberts plays a free-spirited bohemian who takes a job as an art history professor at a conservative college in the early 1950s and is displeased with the expectation that the girls will receive their degrees only to become homemakers.It's not any sort of great movie. The focus on the era's gender roles is developed enough, but it doesn't leave any room for subtlety. This is one movie that's all about being direct with its message (not just the gender roles, but the old-money WASPs' attitude towards minorities). I guess that it's worth seeing to understand the mindset of the 1950s and the falsity of the seemingly perfect lives that women were supposed to have after getting married.OK, not great. Maybe worth seeing once. I wonder how many people realized the irony of showing a Jackson Pollock painting...while co-star Marcia Gay Harden played Lee Krasner (Jackson Pollock's wife).

Women deserve better movies than this. Vapid, superficial. Some moments play out like a Julia Roberts' photo-op: teeth, smile, pout, tears. Emoting is not enough. One never gains a sense that Katherine Watson experiences any personal connection or passion for the subject she teaches. Characters are more like advertisement than three dimensional. Lacking depth. As if stereotypes could replace meaningfulness. Could have been a compelling movie that captured an era and expressed real stories of real women. Ginnifer Goodwin is the better part of this disaster. Would love to see an authentic treatment of the subject, which would require inquiry with actual people of the period. Disappointing. Missed opportunity.

Julia Roberts put on a pretty good performance in this as Katherine Watson, a young art history instructor at Wellesley College in 1953. Wellesley is portrayed in the movie as a bastion of tradition - and especially of the traditional role of women, which was to be wives and mothers. Into that environment came Watson, a "modern" woman, who believed that the women she was teaching were getting an education (as she put it) to be the leaders of the future rather than to marry the leaders of the future. Watson faces opposition to her less than traditional approach to teaching - opposition from the college administration, and even opposition from her students, who for the most part do seem rather obsessed with finding the right man and getting married.It's an interesting context in which to set a movie like this. Historically, of course, this was a time of great flux in the perception of gender roles. During World War II, women had taken over many of the roles men had played, because the men were overseas fighting. With the end of the war, the men returned to their jobs, the women returned to their homes, but, "how ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paris?" Wellesley was fighting to keep them on the farm; Watson wanted to give them the freedom to stay in Paris. The tension of the movie, such as it was, was on this interplay.I suppose that was the greatest weakness I saw in this, however: the tension was limited to short spurts. There were long stretches of the movie which left me wondering what the movie really wanted to accomplish; there wasn't always a clear direction being selected and followed.It's certainly not a bad movie, and Roberts' performance was actually quite good. Overall, though, I did feel that it lacked a real sense of direction and purpose. (5/10)