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Mona Lisa Smile
on DVD (2003)
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| Starring: |
Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dominic West, Juliet Stevenson, Marcia Gay Harden |
| Director: |
Mike Newell |
| Studio: |
COLUMBIA TRI-STAR HOME VIDEO |
| Run time: |
114 mins |
| Certificate: |
 |
| User collections: |
Top Chick Flicks That Make You Cry In A Good Way! |
| Genres: |
Drama, Gay/Lesbian |
| Languages: |
English |
| Dubbed: |
Hungarian |
| Hearing-impaired: |
English |
| Subtitles: |
Arabic, Bulgarian, Croatian, Dutch, English, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Romanian, Serbian, Slovene |
| Released: |
09/07/2004
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| Also Available on: |
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Brief synopsis of Mona Lisa Smile
Mike Newell's MONA LISA SMILE is a pretty period film that combines a quaint pedagogical tale with a feminist dissection of traditional female roles in 1950s society. Julia Roberts leads an impressive cast of top young actresses including Maggie Gyllenhaal, Kirsten Dunst, and Julia Stiles. Roberts is Katherine Watson, a revolutionary art history teacher at Wellesley College in 1953. Though she has true admiration for her intelligent all-female students, she is perturbed that their interest in finding husbands takes precedence over their studies. Determined to instruct them in feminist values and teach them to be independent--defying the college's emphasis on breeding good wives, mothers, and homemakers--Watson is deemed subversive by the administration. Even Watson's identity--from California, over 30 years old, and unmarried--is problematic. And when she turns her class onto modern art rather than teaching the recommended classical curriculum, Watson is severely chastised by the staunchly conservative students and faculty.
Beautiful photography of the picture-perfect Wellesley campus combined with a perpetual parade of lovely period costumes makes MONA LISA SMILE a visual delight. Strong performances by each of the actresses, including Dunst uncharacteristically cast as a prim and proper prude, and Marcia Gay Harden as a boring tv-addicted spinster, only add to the splendour of this enjoyable film.
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Related
Critics Reviews
Radio Times
1950s feminism gets a soft-focus sheen in this sentimental drama from Four Weddings and a Funeral director Mike Newell. Ostensibly a female Dead Poets Society, starring Julia Roberts in the unconventional teacher role, it's an emotionally manipulative chick flick with a quasi-intellectual veneer. Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles and a vampy Maggie Gyllenhaal are among the students at a New England girls' college in 1953 whose lives are changed irrevocably by the arrival of unmarried art history lecturer Roberts and her scandalous free-spirited ways. Though the characters are all recognisable stereotypes, they're solidly performed, while Roberts makes a sympathetic lead, despite her often anachronistic behaviour and appearance. Newell ably captures the tensions caused when tradition and progression clash, but his simplistic view of the past is governed too much by the present to give the film any real authenticity. The end result is an earnest and glossy melodrama that presses all the right buttons yet never quite convinces.
Time Out
In this girls' own Dead Poets Society, maverick art history prof Katherine Watson (Roberts) strains to show...
Read more on www.timeout.com
Halliwell's Film Guide
Slick, predictable drama with Roberts miscast as the earnest pedagogue.
See all 4 Critics Reviews »
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