Spanglish: Critic Reviews

This is a deeply unpleasant movie masquerading as a heartfelt social commentary on life in these United States (or at least in the wealthy republic of Beverly Hills).

[Brooks] opts for soothing fakery and empty multicultural rhetoric to send us home feeling good about ourselves and partaking of the surplus smugness that he clearly has to spare.

A performer's showcase. While the pleasantly sentimental comedy doesn't bowl you over with cinematic technique, it's likely to make audiences happy.

So rancid is Brooks's fury that it's clouded his judgment, so that each of his main characters is a stereotype of the most broad-brush, malodorous nature.

The movie's funny and wicked fun.

One of the most humane works ever made about the lives of working mothers.

As pedestrian as its marital and parental conflicts may be, Spanglish utterly crumbles when it probes matters of cultural identity.

An unusually shallow and facile work for Brooks, but the writing and the performances -- other than Leoni's -- keep us at least halfway involved.

Easy to enjoy, if you're at all susceptible to this sort of thing, but it leaves you with nothing to think about, except for all the opportunities Brooks missed to make something worthwhile out of the material.

Spanglish's central players are like real people touched with the perfect dose of comic exaggeration.

The film's deepest charms come from its ensemble's wacky chemistry and Brooks' warm appreciation of the love between parents and children.

The movie is not quite the sitcom the setup seems to suggest; there are some character quirks that make it intriguing.

Brooks plops moms and dads and kids in the middle of a muddled message movie, losing his characters, his wit and, worst of all, his point.

Sometimes Brooks's ideas are legitimate, but his way of putting them across is dishonest. Sometimes the ideas are dishonest, but his way of putting them across is legitimate.

A pepperpot bubbling with pungent insights and sharp wit.

A distressingly heartwarming domestic drama.

Don't forgive its failures, just try to ignore them. And keep an eye out for Paz Vega. This woman is a movie star.

Deserves an audience because much of Brooks' writing is still strong and fresh.

The film gets better as it goes along ... and all the characters, including Deborah, become more interesting and appealing as we get to know them better.

It's another movie about a dysfunctional family, but this one is different because they're original, lovable, forgivable and fascinating.

Short on real drama and incident and long on tedium thanks to one irredeemably neurotic central character.

There is no shortage of zingers (mostly delivered by Evelyn), but the film lacks credibility.

Brooks, fumbling around with too many characters and too many issues, can't find the heart of the story or give heart to the part of it he chose to focus on.

Feels like inadvertent misogynist psychodrama.

As in most sentimental yarns, this is a flick where credible characterization is held hostage to the demands of the plot and the needs of its message.