Lovely Groans

Oscar pundits who had been keeping several slots warm for Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones may have realized that the film isn't the slam dunk they expected. The Guardian gave the film two stars out of five and called it "so infuriatingly coy, and so desperate to preserve the modesty of its soulful victim that it amounts to an ongoing clean-up operation." Just as harsh was Todd McCarthy in Variety: "When it sticks to the everyday neighborhood inhabited by its characters, The Lovely Bones...finds a reasonable equilibrium between drama and production values. When it ventures beyond it, heaven turns into Hades." [Variety, The Guardian]