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90A charming, highly entertaining romantic adventure full of life, spectacular vistas, and sensual delight.
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80All elements click in "Sun," a shimmering, deeply felt film.
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80The cliches are obscured by the sheer fun of it all.
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75What redeems the film is its successful escapism, and Lane's performance. They are closely linked.
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75The whole movie is at once formulaic, clichéd and predictable, yet surprising, engaging and filled with subtle, unexpected details.
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75Movie and book both are delightful, but very, very different.
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75Chalk it all up to prettiness, if you like, but Lane's case has more to do with spirit -- with warmth and emotional readiness, plus a kind of open-book quality that makes her both lovely and comical, usually at the same time.
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75A fun movie to sit through even when you don't always buy it.
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75You come away enchanted less by the character than by the woman playing her.
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67Diane Lane overplays many scenes, she tries way too hard to be ingratiating and, in many other ways, it's one of the least of her performances.
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63This is a beautifully shot motion picture, and there's no doubt that the lush scenery upstages the actors.
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63While both the scenery and star Diane Lane are highly watchable, the movie is pure froth, a plate-sized helping of zabaglione.
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60The movie is not without charm or humor, but it leaves little for Lane to do besides chuckle at setbacks as if they were naughty children.
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60The movie is sweet but deeply suspect: It's like "Lost Horizon" re-imagined by a realtor.
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60Lane transforms this seriocomic saga of a devastated American divorcee who impulsively purchases a Tuscan villa, thereby changing her life, into a spellbinding display of emotional transparency.
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60This movie, though perfectly pleasant, does not have a great script.
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58The author was able to compensate for the book's plotlessness by contemplating other people leading full lives quite as important as hers. In Wells' movie adaptation, even the birth of a friend's baby becomes all about Frances and the play of emotions on Lane's busy, beautiful face.
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58Does at least come bearing two gifts: the rolling beauty of Tuscany and the understated elegance of actress Diane Lane. The rest of the film is fit fodder for the Oxygen Network.
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50Just soak up that Tuscan sun and wonder when Lane will get another movie, like "Unfaithful" or "A Walk on the Moon," that will let her really shine.
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50Most definitely a chick flick.
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50Lane...is as stunning and changeable as that Tuscan countryside. Without her, this movie would be irksome, pandering as it does to stereotypes, including that of the American woman who goes abroad for easy sex with limpid-eyed hunks.
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50The emotional honesty of [Lane's] performance provides a foundation that supports this shaky and often unbelievable Italian-set hybrid of "Shirley Valentine" and "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House."
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50An uneven love story but a picture-perfect love letter to Italy.
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50Writer-director Audrey Wells never aims higher than postcard filmmaking, and Under The Tuscan Sun at least works on that level, by casting its little operetta of self-realization and remodeling travails against some of the most beautiful scenery in the world.
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50The dumbed-down movie version of Frances Mayes' best-selling travel memoir Under the Tuscan Sun is a virtual case study of Hollywood's irrepressible urge to lower the bar in the hopes of upping the take.
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50It's a pleasure to watch Lane's delicately lived-in face tremble with feeling -- it's the truest thing in the movie -- but the character's desperation feels wrong, the worst kind of sellout.
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50The story of self-discovery through which the writer and director Audrey Wells leads Frances is eminently superficial, although Ms. Wells keeps the movie going with a steady, commanding hand and casts it with an actress who can deftly downshift from serene to sodden.
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50Rises only slightly above the level of a Harlequin romance.
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40Rather than converting messy, real-life experience into slick, formulaic entertainment, Well's script transforms it into a shapeless, internally inconsistent mess of artificial contrivances.
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40Packed with more clichés than a pizza has pepperoni slices, this is truly disappointing, especially after Lane’s stunning performance in "Unfaithful."
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40My cynical half hated it, despite the presence of Lane, who is so magnetic that she could prance around the countryside in the absence of plot and still be compelling somehow.
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40The movie has some sex in it, and yet it's as unsexy as a rusty old olive oil can (minus the olive oil).
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Only Sandra Oh, as the wisecracking lesbian Asian pregnant best friend, provides a bright spot. Get this sidekick her own sitcom!
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30Unforeseeably bad things can happen to good performers.
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30It's like a music video of Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman" filmed in the Chevy Chase Pottery Barn.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 17 out of 31
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Mixed: 3 out of 31
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Negative: 11 out of 31
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