The Nanny Diaries: Critic Reviews

Yes, there are wealthy New Yorkers as toxic as the X's, but by making them so one-dimensional that it threatens to strain the word dimension, The Nanny Diaries becomes as flaccid and predictable as something you'd expect from Hollywood hacks.

As The Nanny Diaries wobbles along uncertainly, it rests on the tense, squared shoulders of Laura Linney.

Batten down the hatches; here's a film that really blows.

A film that is even more lightweight and cliched than the fluff that was the best-selling book.

Linney -- this has happened too much to her -- is once again the best thing in a movie that at most achieves a certain mediocrity.

This isn't life. It's Lifetime.

Despite some clever early fantasy scenes, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's adaptation of best seller The Nanny Diaries won't make Bridget Jones give up her writing.

A clever, satiric novel turned dull-witted movie.

Too false to be funny, too pat to be real.

The movie shouldn't open in the Museum of Natural History but the Museum of the Moving Image -- with a display of chick-flick cliches through the ages.

The Nanny Diaries, despite many bright moments and a superior level of craftsmanship, is now a flabby urban fairy tale.

The movie itself is sort of bland and obvious and comfortable.

The casting is all fine; everything else is pushy and out of joint.

Wealthy New Yorkers don't often get skewered as mercilessly as they do in this comedy by writing and directing duo Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, but the audacity turns out to be deceptive and formulaic.

Satire should be knife-sharp and whip-smart, and The Nanny Diaries never is.

The unfaithful film adaptation so undermines the novel's spiky social satire that it constitutes some kind of aesthetic crime.

There's a surreal tinge to The Nanny Diaries that works both for and against the film.

It sounds like the ultimate chick flick with crossover potential -- Scarlett Johansson learning a lot about life and a little about love in a film based on a cornerstone of chick lit -- but not even chicks will get much out of The Nanny Diaries.

This new comedy rarely rises above standard sitcom fare, a bitter and ironic disappointment given the involvement of American Splendor writer-directors Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman.

Locked down in a celluloid prison cell marked The Nanny Diaries for 105 punishingly awful minutes, I was seconds away from crying 'Attica' and leading a tactical assault on the projectionist's booth when the words 'The End' appeared on screen.

These Diaries devolve into an outraged, sad-eyed social commentary that condemns New York's people of privilege and their rich, child-neglecting ways, but doesn't really let us laugh at them.

What puts The Nanny Diaries a cut above the run-of-the-mill romantic comedy is the acting.

'The Nanny Diaries': Huh? It's supposed to be a comedy?

There's a good movie buried inside The Nanny Diaries, and a good cast trying hard to dig it out. Too bad they don't get much help.

Whatever its faults are, The Nanny Diaries is hardly the disaster that the gossipmongers -- including, perhaps, even the studio that made it -- want us to believe.