Feminism in the 1950s gets a soft-focus sheen in this sentimental drama from Four Weddings and a Funeral director Mike Newell. Ostensibly a female Dead Poets Society, starring Julia Roberts in the unconventional teacher role, it's an emotionally manipulative chick flick with a quasi-intellectual veneer. Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles and a vampy Maggie Gyllenhaal are among the students at a New England girls' college in 1953 whose lives are changed irrevocably by the arrival of unmarried art history lecturer Roberts and her scandalous free-spirited ways. Though the characters are all recognisable stereotypes, they're solidly performed, while Roberts makes a sympathetic lead, despite her often anachronistic behaviour and appearance. Newell ably captures the tensions caused when tradition and progression clash, but his simplistic view of the past is governed too much by the present to give the film any real authenticity. The end result is an earnest and glossy melodrama that presses all the right buttons yet never quite convinces.