Good movie but grossly overrated

Admirable film.

A lot of fun.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Patricia Arquette's best film in my humble opinion. She has obviously, thoroughly researched the conditions suffered by her character and is very convincing. Having one of the conditions myself, I was hesitant about watching this film at first. However, in spite of the Hollywood style happy ending where the bad guy (brilliantly played by Norman Maxwell) got his comeuppance, I still found it to be an interesting and sensitive handling of a subject many people prefer to ignore and hope it'll go away. Beau Bridges' character did appear to come around rather sharply. A change for the better, thank goodness but I wonder if he might have been more reluctant. Having said that, a lot of ground needed to be covered in the hour and a half and it would be churlish of me to downgrade an otherwise wonderful film.

Don't forget about this film.. Listen to your inner heart and you will experience an extraordinary movie. Patricia Arquette is wonderful as the lovely outsider girl. As soon as she gets familiar with the other kids.. she shows her natural talent for social behaviour. A love movie for the higher sensitive people. But don't start crying as I do, when she gets the hearing aid and for the first time were able to hear the birds singing in the woods. Good script very good camera (thats rare) plausible and very good actors and a great story. All in all an extraordinary film and one of P. Arquettes greatest!! Why can't we get more of those movies..

Was genuinely moved by the content of this tale of extremes of human nature. The barbarity of keeping a young girl in a shed versus the humanitarian sincerity was handled well by actress-director Diane Keaton. Patricia Arquette in particular must have found it difficult to play her role as the disadvantaged AND hearing-impaired Alice, uttering her lines as a deaf woman... with all the embarrassment that must go with it. Perhaps I have been alone too long. Or perhaps - over-educated and right after yet another vicious superpower vs. small nation war, with the subsequent revelations of bestial cruelty - I am still surprised by humankind's inhumanity to humankind. But there are pinpricks of light out there, somewhere. And with that thought, Humankind still has, at the very least, some hope...

I didn't even bother to finish watching this one. The movie unfortunately looks as though it were directed by a novice, complete with bad acting and an inconsistent storyline. One glowing fault with this movie is that, even though Reese Witherspoon and her brother are supposed to be preparing poor old Patricia Arquette to interact with the rest of society, they talk to her as if they were speaking to a child (shouldn't they have been speaking to her as an equal?).