Most critics are damning Sweet Home Alabama with faint praise, with most of the praise being reserved for star Reese Witherspoon. Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Daily News, for example, calls it "one dumb movie, but its stupidity is so relentlessly harmless that it almost wins you over in the end." To Stephen Holden in the New York Times, it's "a ball of fluff whose charm stems largely from Ms. Witherspoon's plucky effervescence." Jonathan Foreman in the New York Post says that Witherspoon is "such a delight" that "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." Says Peter Howell in the Toronto Star: "Reese Witherspoon makes the proverbial silk purse out of a sow's ear." And this is the lead paragraph of Joe Morgenstern's review in the Wall Street Journal: "When the sophisticated heroine of Sweet Home Alabama goes back to rural Dixie and her tangled roots, she finds a baloney cake in her parents' ice box. The whole dumb movie is a baloney cake, but the enticing icing on it is Reese Witherspoon, who manages to have a few moments of spontaneous fun in this half-baked store-bought comedy."