Peace, Love & Misunderstanding

Directed by Bruce Beresford

(R)

**

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Jane Fonda is still “a force to be reckoned with,” said Lou Lumenick in the New York Post. The 74-year-old actress gets her “juiciest part in years” in this by-the-numbers comedy, “cheerfully sending up her own image” by playing an aging hippie in Woodstock, N.Y., who turns her grandkids on to pot and free love when their lawyer mother arrives out of the blue with the two youngsters in tow. But the script is so “tone-deaf and hokey” that “you just feel embarrassed for everyone involved,” including young actors Elizabeth Olsen and Nat Wolff, said Tom Long in The Detroit News. Not only are we asked to accept that Catherine Keener’s uptight New Yorker hasn’t seen her mother for 20 years, we’re asked to believe that each visitor finds a new love interest within a day. There will be “assorted heart-to-heart talks,” a lot of “superficial fun,” and “not much more,” said Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. Director Bruce Beresford seems content to have created “an undemanding formula picture.” On that level, at least, “the film works.”