| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 24, 2006

Good writing aside, this screenplay contained the elements of two different films. One of them might have been quite persuasive.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 23, 2005

Extremely well written in the fearless way of a smarty pants on a roll in the university cafeteria.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 23, 2005

| Original Score: C | Sep 3, 2005

Wood's fine work is undermined by the movie it's trapped in, which feels like a rough draft of itself: Skander Halim's screenplay is unnecessarily twisty and gimmicky, and some of the teenspeak dialogue falls flat, already out of date.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 2, 2005

The screenplay by Skander Halim falters. It's too convoluted and cloudy to have the intended effect.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 2, 2005

Self-conscious, overdone, shallow, and just not up to the level of its star.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 2, 2005

Leaves no gender, race, class or religion untouched in its scabrous effort to show how cruel humans can be. But it also leaves viewers with no one at all to like, or believe.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Sep 1, 2005

The movie shifts tones as abruptly as a teenager's mood swings.

| Original Score: C+ | Sep 1, 2005

It's so smug about it and pleased with itself.

Full Review | Aug 29, 2005

Pretty Persuasion considers itself snarky black comedy, one of those self-consciously 'outrageous' artifacts that means to shock even as it amuses.

| Aug 26, 2005

Partly a character study, partly a monster movie (with the girl as the monster) and partly a satire of American values in the modern age, the film is also, alas, only partly successful.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 26, 2005

Pretty Persuasion is a nasty piece of work. Yet it offers some unvarnished and amusing thoughts about American contradictions.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 26, 2005

Unlike Heathers and Election -- both brilliant satires because they exaggerate reality, magnify and darken the truth -- Pretty Persuasion is not funny because it's not true.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 25, 2005

Populated by characters that are either over-the-top cartoonish or drawn with all the depth of stick figures, there is only one reason to watch this latest entry in the high-school-as-Dante's-ring genre -- Evan Rachel Wood.

| Aug 25, 2005

The material in Pretty Persuasion needed to be handled as heavy drama, or played completely for comedy, and by trying to have it both ways, the movie has it neither way.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 25, 2005

Wood does flip cynicism with such precise, easy rhythms and with such obvious pleasure in naughtiness that she's impossible to hate.

Full Review | Aug 22, 2005

Pretty Persuasion is just smart enough for scattershot humor, but not perceptive or deep enough to be meaningful.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 13, 2005

Pretty Persuasion is so exploitative and misogynistic that its last-minute dramatic turns and pleas for tolerance and understanding come off as manipulative as its heroine.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 12, 2005

Pretty Persuasion sets out to be a social critique but settles for smug disdain.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 12, 2005