Khouri manages, with terrific flair, to keep the extremes of screwball farce and blood-curdling family intensity on one continuum -- not only through the strength of the performances (including one from James Garner, who, as Sida's dad, gets the best one-liners) but in the ways they match across time.

Even though she's (Khouri) determined to give us feel-good entertainment, she's not at all afraid to let the darker moments be very dark indeed.

The only character we get to know fully as she evolves from child to older woman is Vivi. Too bad the movie didn't also trace the lives of her "sisters." That might have been divine.

Ya-Ya Sisterhood is so divine. It offers a world where friendship is forever, the half-empty glass is refilled and the men are perfect.

There's death, domestic violence, alcoholism, racism, attempted suicide, and a mental breakdown. Naturally, it's a comedy about the eccentricities of Southern women.

These wonderfully adept actresses take so much pleasure in playing long-faded Southern belles, in mixing the genteel and the bawdy as they conduct their extended therapy session, that it will be difficult for even the most hardened Yankee curmudgeon to resist them.

As a rich, gum-chewing matron who tools around in her canary-yellow Rolls-Royce, Flanagan is the picture's real scene-stealer.

Gives us a lot to enjoy and something most studio movies don't even try for: an attempt at the richness, density and sheer contrariness of life.

Women deserve better women's pictures -- men too.

Less successful in exploring the long-term effects of mental breakdown than in dispensing short-term comic pick-me-ups, Ya-Ya wrings abundant laughter and tears.

The movie finally comes together into something that is genuinely -- and almost quietly -- stirring.

This is a work of excess and passion, an untidy sprawl of a motion picture that is sometimes ragged, occasionally uncertain, but -- and this is what's important -- always warm, accessible and rich in emotional life.

During one or two comic set-pieces, you can see the appeal that the Ya-Yas hold for readers. But you can also sense, farther in the distance, the more vital film that might have been.

Suffers from an excess of material crammed into too little screen time. There's so much story that the characters get short shrift; you have to wonder, for example, what became of Siddalee's three siblings.