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80Khouri manages, with terrific flair, to keep the extremes of screwball farce and blood-curdling family intensity on one continuum -- not only through the strength of the performances (including one from James Garner, who, as Sida's dad, gets the best one-liners) but in the ways they match across time.
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75Ya-Ya Sisterhood is so divine. It offers a world where friendship is forever, the half-empty glass is refilled and the men are perfect.
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75The only character we get to know fully as she evolves from child to older woman is Vivi. Too bad the movie didn't also trace the lives of her "sisters." That might have been divine.
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75There's death, domestic violence, alcoholism, racism, attempted suicide, and a mental breakdown. Naturally, it's a comedy about the eccentricities of Southern women.
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75Even though she's (Khouri) determined to give us feel-good entertainment, she's not at all afraid to let the darker moments be very dark indeed.
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70As a rich, gum-chewing matron who tools around in her canary-yellow Rolls-Royce, Flanagan is the picture's real scene-stealer.
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70These wonderfully adept actresses take so much pleasure in playing long-faded Southern belles, in mixing the genteel and the bawdy as they conduct their extended therapy session, that it will be difficult for even the most hardened Yankee curmudgeon to resist them.
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63Gives us a lot to enjoy and something most studio movies don't even try for: an attempt at the richness, density and sheer contrariness of life.
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63Less successful in exploring the long-term effects of mental breakdown than in dispensing short-term comic pick-me-ups, Ya-Ya wrings abundant laughter and tears.
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63Women deserve better women's pictures -- men too.
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60This is a work of excess and passion, an untidy sprawl of a motion picture that is sometimes ragged, occasionally uncertain, but -- and this is what's important -- always warm, accessible and rich in emotional life.
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60The movie finally comes together into something that is genuinely -- and almost quietly -- stirring.
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50The film relies a bit too much on the humor of older women flipping each other off and mouthing obscenities, although it is hilarious to see the usually proper Smith frantically chopping up a roofie to slip into Sidda's drink.
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50Khouri seems never to have met a "chick flick" cliché she didn't like, from the ubiquity of emotional telephone conversations to the lachrymose (but entirely predictable and dramatically flabby) reconciliation at the end.
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50Divine cast keeps 'Ya-Ya Sisterhood' from falling flat
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50As for the Ya-Yas: They're not as much fun as the First Wives' Club.
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50A question: If you hire actresses from England, Kansas, Ireland and Michigan, shouldn't someone teach them all to do believable Southern accents -- and remind them to keep doing those accents as the film goes on?
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50Suffers from an excess of material crammed into too little screen time. There's so much story that the characters get short shrift; you have to wonder, for example, what became of Siddalee's three siblings.
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50Should the likes of Burstyn, Flanagan, Smith, and Knight have to be reduced to playing eccentric caricatures of aging Southern belles?
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50For those enamored with Wells' books, however, this film version will likely meet their expectations, and it undoubtedly will spawn more Ya-Ya chapters throughout the country.
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50The magnolias in Callie Khouri's fried green movie look limp.
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50During one or two comic set-pieces, you can see the appeal that the Ya-Yas hold for readers. But you can also sense, farther in the distance, the more vital film that might have been.
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50Isn't so much a movie as a tract, a parable in which the charred wisdom of its characters is much more significant than the intricacies of their lives.
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50Perhaps not since "Steel Magnolias" has Hollywood turned out a movie so resolutely for and about women.
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50The movie doesn't have any undercurrents, psychological or cinematic. -- The Blessed Mother ends up looking like a drunken housewife.
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The tart, often jauntily profane dialogue and sharp interactions of the present-day relationships give Divine Secrets its occasional zip; when Khouri takes us back in time, especially to the Ya-Yas' early childhood, the movie flags.
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40The thinness of the movie, which is what is intermittently enjoyable about it, is at odds with its sob-sister pretensions.
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40Except for Ashley Judd, who shows true grit as Vivi in her babe days, the effect is like being buried in molasses. For guys whose pain threshold is way low when it comes to the bonding of Steel Magnolias, Ya-Ya is a definite no-no.
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40As earnest and smart-alecky as an entire season of Designing Women, Ya-Ya is sure to score with its redemptive family melodramatics and stock eccentric characterizations.
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38Rubber-stamped from the same mold that has produced an inexhaustible supply of fictional Southern belles who drink too much, talk too much, think about themselves too much, try too hard to be the most unforgettable character you've ever met, and are, in general, insufferable.
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38For a strangely-titled, female-oriented drama about mothers and daughters bonding, try "The Joy Luck Club" and leave Ya-Ya as a phrase uttered by one-year olds who have yet to learn how to talk.
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30It reduces a large cast to an unwieldy collection of simpletons and caricatures.
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30What is perhaps most disappointing about this ham-handed film, though, particularly since it was directed by the screenwriter of the righteously raging "Thelma and Louise," is its crypto-misogyny.
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25Khouri's new picture takes all this talent and turns it into the kind of manipulative mush that Hollywood used to market under the condescending label "woman's picture" years ago.
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20This is potentially near tragic material, and playing it as an all-forgiving comedy is a waste of everyone's time.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 13 out of 20
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Mixed: 0 out of 20
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Negative: 7 out of 20
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JamesH.6
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BarbaraD.10
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AninoWatcher0