In the Land of Women: Critic Reviews

In the Land of Women combines hugs and ''pain'' and dialogue so fakey-cute it makes your ears hurt.

The meek, mopey comedy In the Land of Women is the film equivalent of a sensitive emo band with one foot in alternative rock and the other in the squishy pop mainstream: a softer, fuzzier Garden State.

The film belongs to Brody, an endearing screen presence.

What matters here aren't the narrative events, so much as the movie's emotional textures.

No one is conniving or desperate enough for the movie to become a decent melodrama. And the conversations are too stale to culminate in interesting romance.

Without all the soppy plot devices, the Land of Women might have been someplace worth visiting.

A movie with one awkward identity crisis.

Why make a garrulous movie about people in crisis if Olympia Dukakis winds up muzzled? Of all the troubled gabbers in Kasdan's film, the prickliest and most proficient is wasted in a few brief scenes.

Kasdan is the son of director Lawrence Kasdan. So while he should know better, he can be forgiven his many rookie errors. Why? Because in creating Carter and getting nuanced work from Brody, he has shown promise.

Lip-locking lapses aside, Carter's relationships with Sarah and with Lucy are rooted in the sharing of ideas and dreams and disappointments and fears.

In the Land of Women doesn't for a moment feel messy and chaotic where it counts.

This comedy drama is capably acted and undeniably touching in spots, although less than two weeks after seeing it, I can remember having been undeniably touched but not much else.

The film belongs to Brody, irritating and endearing and relatable in ways that actors rarely are.

The whole mess feels like a television pilot that was never picked up.

An admirable first effort and likely to be enjoyed by women who wouldn't mind meeting that good-looking, self-effacing young man, and men who may be under the illusion that they in some way resemble him.

It can't decide on a tone, so it jars the viewer from one moment to another.

it is amazing to discover just how much this absorbing, intelligent picture has going for it: a strong sense of time and place, interesting characters, painfully sincere direction and an intriguing scenario that pauses and breathes in all the right places

An appealingly scruffy if overly programmatic drama.

One of those films in formed by intimate personal experience -- the experience of seeing Garden State.

It's a wistfully humorous romantic weeper with emphasis on the humorous.

This potentially saccharine weepy has an authentic ring, thanks to Jon Kasdan's script and a cast capable of delivering clever lines that sound just about right for whatever situation they're in.

With dialogue that is often precious though occasionally thoughtful, Kasdan has made a film that's not bad, just irritating.

The O.C. may be over, but Adam Brody isn't.

It's the kind of production that's pleasant to watch because it allows viewers to spend some time with believable characters who face 'regular' problems, but do so without becoming boring or overly familiar.

With an age-old cinema theme of a young man's maturation, it also needs to land female ticket-buyers but seems a lot like something women could find at home on the WE channel.