Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 17, 2011

Smarter than your average romantic comedy it may be, but this family-dysfunction indie is playing it a bit safe.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 18, 2008

Strong performances and a few laughs, but the story feels lazy next to superior efforts recently in the same genre.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 16, 2008

And since, like 99 percent of all other Sundance-type indies, Smart People is shot in the dreariest grays possible ... the movie's not much to look at, either.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 1, 2008

So much good work must not go overlooked. I just loved this movie because it's witty, intellectual without being pretentious, and filled with characters who are logically stressed and anxious to connect to a world outside of themselves.

Full Review | Apr 16, 2008

Smart People is an indie film that plays the (jangle, jangle) same chords (strum, strum) as a lot of other heartfelt comedies about too-wise children and codgers taking humanity lessons.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 16, 2008

In his first film as director, Noam Murro creates moments of comic disconnection, relieved by minuscule surges of warmth. He's very precise; he has a nice touch.

| Apr 14, 2008

Good acting, nice smart script.

Full Review | Apr 14, 2008

[A] middling romantic comedy.

| Apr 14, 2008

The excellent script for Smart People is the work of Mark Jude Poirier, a fiction writer who has clearly spent enough time around English departments to have studied the tribal ways of the literary professoriate with ethnographic rigor.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 14, 2008

Smart People made me happy from start to finish.

| Apr 11, 2008

Call it a 'could see' -- something you can drop in on when you have nothing better to do and emerge from feeling not at all cheated by the experience.

| Apr 11, 2008

Though the principals are so appealing with their smart, comical exchanges, the film's forced situations keep it from being the clever, engaging tale it aspires to be.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 11, 2008

Just one person saves Smart People from being completely wretched. It's the presence of Thomas Haden Church.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 11, 2008

As tough as Lawrence is to like, Smart People is even harder to hate, mainly because of the sharply observed script by novelist Mark Jude Poirier.

| Apr 11, 2008

Nobody does steely quite like the basso-voiced Page -- her Vanessa is a sort of Young Republican version of Juno.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 11, 2008

Call the cops. Oscar nominees Ellen Page and Thomas Haden Church steal Smart People right from under the noses of its ostensible stars, Sarah Jessica Parker and Dennis Quaid.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 11, 2008

In what world does Smart People exist? Clearly not the real one, though this dramedy wants to think it's filled with ironic insights about love and family.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 11, 2008

The film brandishes the same anti-intellectual cliché we've heard time and again: Extremely smart folks are inherently unpleasant, uptight and unhappy. 'Tis better to be a touch dumb.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 11, 2008

The thorny dialogue, the rancorous arguments, the unexplained surliness of Lawrence's son -- all that nasty stuff melts away, covering up plot weaknesses in a warm glow of nuclear-family bonhomie.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 11, 2008