Juno

This film walks a tight rope between honest sentiment and self-conscious preciousness from start to finish, but it never falls off. Throughout the movie, I felt myself alternately connecting to the characters and annoyed by a surfeit of cutsey affectation, but never enough of either of those things to completely give myself over to the movie, or to reject it. Ellen Page's title character, while funny and charming, isn't really recognizably human. When the film really works, it's due to the relationship between yuppie adopting parents Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner: their interactions have the ring of truth, and the film does a smart job of undermining the audience's expectations of them. Bateman's character, in particular, is surprising and heartbreakingly human. He also provides a cautionary glimpse of what life looks like when you never let go of your youthful fixation on being "cool." It's a view that has a profound (if overly pat) effect on Juno, which goes a long way towards justifying some of the movie's more overbearing moments of glibness.

Score: 7.9