'Mona Lisa Smile'
Paint by numbers

ONE AUTUMN DAY in 1953, as the "doors of wisdom" at all-women's college Wellesley burst open in a ritual likely to startle anyone who's gone through the university system recently, art history instructor Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts) watches a group of students flood into a room like angels entering the chapel of higher learning. If this poignant scene chokes you up as much as it does Katherine, Mona Lisa Smile is your movie. Otherwise, it could be a rough academic year. We're deep in Daughters of the American Revolution territory, and Katherine, in the unconventional-stranger-comes-to-town role, is contending with some certified brats – notable among them Kirsten Dunst as a slightly vicious, primly unhappy young woman whose dreams seem to be confined to marriage and a house equipped with a washer-dryer. But we're also deep inside the genre of teachers-who-inspire-us, and a few slides of Soutine and Picasso are enough to slap the smirks off the faces of cool, studious Julia Stiles and Maggie Gyllenhaal's potentially tragic sexual adventurer. Soon Katherine's got them wrestling with age-old undergraduate questions like "What is art?" and "Why do women wear girdles?" Mona Lisa Smile is clearly trying hard to get its message out, and there's nothing wrong with the movie's main directives: for girls to close their textbooks, consider all options, use birth control, defy their parents as necessary, and generally start thinking for themselves. But the latter might sound more convincing if Mona Lisa Smile didn't tread so firmly in the tracks of other movies – in particular, 1989's Dead Poets Society – that you can see most of the steps in advance. (Lynn Rapoport)