The Family Stone

The Family Stone is not likely to give King Kong much competition at the box office this weekend -- not even as a film appealing to a niche crowd, critics suggest. Almost everything about The Family Stone is so schematic and prefabricated that it should come with its own easy-to-follow blueprints, writes Gene Seymour in Newsday. Rick Groen in the Toronto Globe & Mail writes similarly: Popped in the oven and marked with a predictable P, The Family Stone is the Christmas cookie of Christmas movies - this thing is so pat it should come with the recipe attached. But Michael Booth in the Denver Post suggests that the recipe works. The Family Stone creeps up on the audience, he writes. We're sitting there thinking: Ah, another shameless attempt at a holiday tear-jerker. ... Suddenly we're wiping away tears, glancing around to make sure no one noticed we had fallen for this steaming cup of melodrama. Lou Lumenick finds the movie to be a happy exception to run-of-the-mill family-oriented holiday movies. He writes, This rollicking screwball dramedy goes mercifully light on the sugar, offering some tart performances from a first-rate cast headed by Sarah Jessica Parker and Diane Keaton. And inevitably, Susan Walker writes in the Toronto Star: The Family Stone is a lot slyer than you might expect.

Cute...goes in a few too many directions, but it's got a great cast.