Smart People

If you enjoy glib, offbeat humor, the smartest thing you might do all day is buy yourself a ticket.

Quaid's great, Page and Church are even better and Parker proves there's life beyond Sex and the City.

Smart People has enough funny moments and original ideas within its character dynamics that it's genuinely enjoyable based on the strength of its script and cast alone.

Dennis Quaid, I forgive you for your awful performance as an irritable and verbally challenged Secret Service agent in the recent execrable thriller Vantage Point.

Somewhere along the line, Smart People went from being a darkish comedy about a dysfunctional family trying to right itself to being the next Ellen Page Project.

Smart People has a lot going for it, if not originality, beginning with its stated focus on intelligence and its cast.

Smart is indeed the word for Smart People, an extremely well-acted film that manages to be simultaneously funny and troubling.

With so many Hollywood movies purposely dumbed down to maximize their audience, calling a screenplay "smart" could be the kiss of death. But intelligence both oozes from the film Smart People and is its prime subject.

In the hands of first-time feature director Noam Murro and first-time screenwriter Mark Poirier, Smart People comes off as an engaging and soft-bellied counterpart to Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale.

It is sweet, but short of cloying, and never so predictable that we don't want to see what happens next.

Smart People feels like literature rather than cinema, focusing on emotions and relationships instead of plot.

Oscar nominees Ellen Page and Thomas Haden Church steal Smart People right from under the noses of its ostensible stars, Sarah Jessica Parker and Dennis Quaid.

It might not be as brilliant as its title indicates, but Smart People is at least in the 75th percentile.

Enjoyable for its words and for the way its smart actors toss those words out like flying daggers.

This isn't a movie for folks who think that Will Ferrell plus sporting equipment equals sure-fire comedy. The jokes go for chuckles, not belly laughs. The humor is low-key and rooted in reality.

The actors in Smart People are such lively, offbeat company that you're happy to spend time with them.

First-time director Noam Murro's establishing scenes of the character's eccentricity are overdone, almost heavy-handed.

Much of the dialogue is sharp and memorable and the cast is first rate.

Smart People is a movie with love and humour, but you'd never call it a romantic comedy.

Smart People seems to be maneuvering for a slot among the Little Miss Sunshines of the world, with its alternating doses of quirk and mild sentiment.

What promises to be a fresh, original movie turns into a cross between Wonder Boys and Family Ties.

Smart? Yes, but not original. The emotionally stunted academic is a tried-and-true choice for high-minded movies.

Smart People scores high marks for its intelligence, wit and fine cast but slips a grade for remaining as aloof as its main character.

Smart People is a smart movie, but it's not smart enough. So much effort was put into the snappy dialogue that no one noticed the story falls apart in the final 20 minutes.

Smart People is the type of meandering movie where we wonder along with the characters. They wonder where they're going; we wonder where the movie's going.

Smart People is fairly intelligent, mildly amusing and clinically depressed.

Ironically, Smart People has a trait in common with a few of its characters. It's a little smug and condescending toward other people -- particularly toward the audience.

Fans of Little Miss Sunshine and Juno, or other movies about dysfunctional families and quirky characters, will probably like Smart People just fine.

Smart People is not particularly smart. Or funny. Or terribly moving.

Smart People is My Fair Lady without the classic songs and with a key role reversal: Here, the pompous professor needs the makeover.

It feels like a movie that would like to tell five stories but has room enough for only one.

Though it features witty dialogue and good performances, the plot contrivances keep it from being an altogether winning enterprise.

There's more than a whiff of Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale in the air.

Smart People, dumb choices: It's true for both the characters and the filmmakers.

The performances go a long way toward making Smart People an enjoyable, if familiar, outing.

This is one of those university comedies where the characters take themselves too seriously to be funny.

Smart People is an effortful attempt at the sort of trenchant comedy a film such as Sideways managed without breaking a sweat.

Smart People plays like a sitcom writer's idea of a Noah Baumbach film, with characters who are amusing, intelligent and screwed-up but not as prickly or treacherous as Baumbach's.

Some good performances and witty dialogue still can’t lift this mildly entertaining but unexceptional comedy into a must-see. Really Smart People will probably wait for the DVD release.

Aims to be a funny/touching examination of a dysfunctional family seasoned with irony, some big-name actors and a vaguely indie/arthouse sensibility. It misses.

The script by Mark Jude Poirier gets bleaker than expected, but the cynicism feels honest and the sharp humor is delicious.

Smart People isn't so much anti-intellectual as it is hyper-ignorant of the ways in which people interact and behave.

Whether one chooses to be generous, and call Smart People a companion piece to Noah Baumbach's dryly hilarious dysfunction screed The Squid and the Whale, or critical, and call it a cheap imitation, the fact remains: It's not nearly as good.

The characters are furnished by novelist Mark Jude Poirier, but there's nothing rich or original about them.

In his feature debut, commercials director Noam Murro gets a distinctive performance from Church, but everything else about his film is generic.

As a comedy, it has some really funny moments. But as a romance, it gives off about as many sparks as a slush-soaked sock. As drama, it barely registers at all.

Ellen Page's performance as the uptight daughter, a female Alex P. Keaton, elicits enough smiles to tell you Juno was no fluke.

Smart People seems as though it's going to be a smart movie, and along the way it suggests what might have been. But in the end it's neither smart nor about people.

It barely manages to make it to the level of Dan in Real Life, The Upside of Anger and other tediously milquetoast movies in which boring, middle-class white folks wonder what it’s all for.

Good actors don’t have a chance with material this shallow, which has no human truths and, more obviously, no laughs.

In what world does Smart People exist? Clearly not the real one, though this dramedy wants to think it's filled with ironic insights about love and family.

Smart People manages to entertain through truth in advertising. These are smart, glib people, with enough witty things to say to be worth our time.

An accumulation of meaningless family squabbles sutured together by what must be the most overwrought, intrusive score ever, Smart People should have hired a few.

Blame first-time director Noam Murro for the torpid romance and the listless pace.

Its biggest offense is using stereotypes in place of any substantive character development.

Just one person saves Smart People from being completely wretched. It's the presence of Thomas Haden Church as Chuck, Lawrence's layabout adopted brother.

It’s an attempt at wit, when more accurate descriptions of Smart People would be dimwit or nitwit.

Smart People is a borderline-excruciating exercise in trying to replicate the eccentric charm of Little Miss Sunshine.