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Critics Praise Julia Roberts’s Performance In “Larry Crowne”

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Even if “Larry Crowne”‘s box-office performance has been rather disappointing and the reviews for the film kind of underwhelming, all the critics had to agree about the fact that Julia’s performance in the movie was brilliant. Here is a collection of reviews praising Julia’s work in “Larry Crowne”:

Roberts has rarely been as effective because she usually just flashes that horsey grin and sense of superiority—which in Mercedes suggests a form of defensiveness. Her vulnerability is part of what Hanks and Vardalos keenly perceive throughout the film.
NY Press

For many viewers, of course, the suspense will come not from waiting for Larry to balance his checkbook but for Roberts’s big, dour mouth to quiver … and twist … and then … any time now … here it comes … Julia smiles!!! And Julia is wonderful, as she often is when she plays uptight. Watch her face as she enters her first class and sees nine—not the state-mandated minimum of ten—students: It’s the relief of a sourpuss who truly would rather not deal with other human beings, especially in the morning with a hangover. Mercedes is also fed up with her indolent, porn-loving blogger husband, played by Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston. The Internet, blogging: These aren’t healthy things in the personal-touch world of Larry Crowne. Mercedes needs a meetup. And as she watches Larry speak to the class, her long legs angled demurely under her desk, she begins to be interested.
The New Yorker

It’s also a treat to watch Roberts’ splendid acting as Mercedes slowly transforms into an enthusiastic teacher once more — as well as to see the amorous rapport developing between Mercedes and Larry.
Reel Talk

From the moment public-speaking teacher Mercedes Tainot steps out of her car and into a pair of sky-high heels, she has us in her lovely grip.
Roberts, always charming and often humorously clumsy in her parts, is a keen comedic actor. But in this role, under the scrutiny of a camera lens that seems intent on revealing her every pore, she offers up a little more.
Professor Tainot is a blasé, burned-out boozehound. Her husband (a hilarious Bryan Cranston) is an egomaniac with a penchant for porn, and her students seem more interested in texting than textbooks. Perhaps it’s the edgy despair that we relate to, because when the good professor sets aside the booze and turns her considerable attention to her humble student, Larry, we celebrate.
Kansas City

Which may be why the only performance remotely worth rooting for among Hanks’ cloying gallery of adorables is Julia Roberts’ quietly enraged turn as Larry’s jaded professor, a woman stranded in a rotten marriage and a precarious job who has all but lost interest in motivating her students to become effective public speakers. Being the kind of film that it is, Larry Crowne will in due course regress her into the dewy-eyed, hair-tossing mode Roberts is so clearly chafing to leave behind. But not before she has squeezed in a potently unsettling portrait of grit-your-teeth despair, laced with simmering fury. With any luck, it will secure for Roberts a big ol’ Meryl Streep of a career after 40.
NPR

Roberts is actually the best thing in the movie. She comes to class looking sour and hung-over. Her lines are delivered with a tang missing everywhere else in the movie. You wonder how much more interesting “Bad Teacher’’ would have been had conniving Cameron Diaz squared off against bitter Roberts, who, of course, in “Larry Crowe,’’ is Good Teacher. (The first word she writes on the board is “care.’’ Although when she does it, the chalk breaks up and her emphasis comically peters out.)
The smugness people say they dislike about Roberts is almost muscular here. Her snobbery and exasperation toward both her Neanderthal husband (Bryan Cranston) and her small and small-minded class are rigged in her favor, but they work.
Boston

Roberts reminds us what a good comic actress she can be, bringing a light touch to an acerbic, jaded character who could have been an audience turnoff.
Chicago Reader

Still, if you want to really like “Larry Crowne,” instead of just like it a little, don’t think of it as a Hanks movie. Think of it as a Julia Roberts movie, because as a vehicle for Roberts, “Larry Crowne” has a lot to recommend it. She plays a community college professor whose life is heading into complete professional and spiritual burnout, and that’s exactly how she plays it. It’s a portrait in disgust and exhaustion, teetering on the edge of hopelessness, and the humor she brings to it is the humor of an appealingly cynical person with enough distance to marvel at how her life has gone off the rails.
To see Roberts in “Larry Crowne” – and in recent movies, good and bad, such as “Eat Pray Love,” “Valentine’s Day,” “Duplicity” – is to see an actress bringing much more to the table in her 40s than she ever did as a young woman. She has several scenes in which she has to argue with her husband, an author turned blogger turned Internet porn addict, and her weariness is so lived-in and so complete that we get the whole history.
When Roberts does smile these days, it’s not the smile of someone who has been told too many times about her smile that she confers it only as a benediction. It’s the smile of someone dazzled by absurdity. She’s not smiling at us anymore, but for us.
San Fransisco

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