Beautiful: Critic Reviews

The movie is so nasty to its mostly female characters that it feels harshly misogynist.

Guys, quick huddle here. If your girlfriend even suggests seeing this movie, you might want to consider these time-tested words: 'Satan, go ye hence from the soul of my girlfriend. I shall not abide thy evil channeling.'

It manages to find an almost pitch-perfect accumulation of ill-matched tones, sheer grotesquerie, near-heroic absurdity and self-canceling folly.

The tame, confused script eventually sinks the film.

Like a pageant contestant who flops in talent but scores well in the inspirational speech, there are elements and nuances that save the movie from total washout.

As predictable as a beauty queen's tearful acceptance speech.

A movie with so many inconsistencies, improbabilities, unanswered questions and unfinished characters that we have to suspend not only disbelief but also intelligence.

Sally, get it straight: Mona doesn't deserve to be cheered. We don't like her. We really, really don't like her.

ally Field's direction is pedestrian, though she does manage to get shamelessly winning performances out of Driver and Eisenberg.

Flat, witless, and sappy (a very bad combo), Sally Field's embarrassing feature directorial debut aims to say something "relevant" about American society's obsession with physical looks at the expense of "inner beauty" and moral integrity.

The kind of movie that connoisseurs of bad cinema will really, really like. Rarely does a movie go so thoroughly wrong in so many ways.

This movie wants to have it both ways: to score points against beauty pageants and the cult of feminine beauty in our culture, but also to root for Mona. It doesn't work.

Some will argue that this review is cruel, and they may be right -- but so is being losing two hours of one's life to this inexcusably bad tripe.

In a feature directorial debut that never feels like one, Field is as effortless behind a camera as she is in front of one.

Beautiful is just bad, sadly. Where's the plot?

An uneasy mix of broad satire, soap opera outlandishness, and movie-of-the-week sappiness.

It's treacly, plastic and shamelessly obvious, and yet, on a low-rent level, it somehow works.

...one of that growing genre of mainstream Hollywood shots at the main chance -- an unfunny comedy.

Pior do que a direcao de Sally Field, so mesmo o carater desprezivel da personagem principal: uma mulher egoista, futil e irritante. Ao longo do filme, eu nao queria apenas que ela perdesse o concurso; queria que ela sofresse.

When a person is suffering deeply, Field cues you in to what they're thinking by having voices from the past echoing all around them, a technique that's more often used in cautionary drivers' ed documentaries...

Sally Field's directing is unindictable, but the script and the acting are close to grotesque.

Now we know where Forrest Gump got at least part of his liabilities.

Every mushy element of the script is robustly wrung for every last drip of sap.

Focuses on one woman's heartfelt and funny journey in search of what beauty really means.

Even a couple of sharp pokes at pageant conventions can't keep the clumsy story from stumbling when on the catwalk.