SWEET HOME ALABAMA

"'Sweet Home Alabama' is second-rate fluff with a first-rate star. It's as preposterous and phony as a Confederate C-note, but Reese Witherspoon has so much natural beauty, talent and charm she guarantees more fun than the day the hogs ate Willie." -- Rex Reed, The New York Observer

"Stereotyped and pandering, in a mealy Hollywood way, to dingbat notions of New York City power-brokering and Deep South bubbahood? You bet, darlin'... All of which would make 'Sweet Home Alabama' unbearable were Witherspoon not such a genuinely attractive performer. Pinning her easy, roll-with-the-punches performance between gestures of city elegance and those of country spunk, the Nashville-born actress manages, from time to time, to give Melanie (and, by extension, her two handsome admirers) a dignity and autonomy the script itself doesn't know what to do with." -- Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

"If 'Sweet Home Alabama,' directed by Andy Tennant from a screenplay by C. Jay Cox, has the ingredients for a classic screwball comedy, the movie is in such a rush to entertain that it barely connects the dots of its story. But it still has its effectively goofy comic moments." -- -- Stepehn Holden, The New York Times

"Reese Witherspoon solidifies her position as America's Sweetheart (in the process raising the unsettling question of whether Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan are already dowager queens)...but 'Sweet Home Alabama' is still thin gruel....Director Andy Tennant sets up a conflict between cruel, shallow city slicksters and pure country folk, but his distaste for the latter is so poorly disguised that the entire enterprise of 'Sweet Home Alabama' finally collapses in a heap of general contempt." -- Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post

"...the combination of a wearily formulaic plot and an uneven comic tone--which lurches from anemic sentimentality to lame slapstick to (presumably) unintentional nastiness and back to sentimentality--would be fatal for a would-be screwball comedy like this one. But Witherspoon is such a delight--her comic timing so good, and her pixie-ish good looks so fascinating --that she manages to make'Sweet Home Alabama' seem charming and funny. It's only when you're leaving the theater that her spell wears off and you realize just how bad the movie, directed by Andy Tennant, really is." -- Jonathan Foreman, The New York Post