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Title: Somehow manages to be both superificial and pretentious.
Review: Every moment of Parenthood rings false. Neither Lowell Ganz nor Babaloo Mandel is a very good screenwriter; together, they are usually appalling, and never more so than here. The movie pretends to "cover" a wealth of parenting difficulties and fails to treat any of them in any but the most superificial, predictable ways. Ron Howard's direction is consistently inept; time after time he fails to find the emotional heart of a scene. A fine movie could have been made with this much acting talent, but not in the hands of these writers and this director.
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