The Perfect Family

Directed by Anne Renton

(PG-13)

**

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In her first leading screen role in years, Kathleen Turner proves too good for the film she’s in, said Alison Willmore in the A.V. Club. Asked to play a devout Catholic who tries to hide inconvenient truths about her husband and adult children when she’s nominated for a parish service award, she gives a performance “that’s generous even when the film isn’t.” Her Eileen Cleary is a nuanced character noticeably out of place in an “overly uncomplicated” fable about the clash between church decree and liberal secular values. The sources of Eileen’s embarrassment simply feel too programmatic, said Stephen Holden in The New York Times. Her husband is a recovering alcoholic, her son a philanderer, and her daughter a pregnant lesbian. The resulting culture-clash dialogue “has the loud, mechanical clickety-clack of a 40-year-old episode of All in the Family.” Somehow, the screenplay also fails to give Eileen a final big moment, said Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News. The character’s “only real purpose in this story is to learn some valuable lessons,” but even those lessons “are addressed so skittishly” that they barely register.