Easy A

First published on 15 Sep 2010. Updated on 19 Sep 2010.

Come in Lindsay Lohan: your time is up. Ever since you went off the rails we’ve been on the lookout for a feisty, freckled ranga with a straight-bourbon voice and killer comic timing, and we’ve found her in the form of Emma Stone, Easy A’s sexy breakout star. Stone is Olive Penderghast, a high-school high-achiever whose white lies about having lost her virginity get her branded the school hussy and soon have the school’s gay boys and losers queuing up to have their fictional way with her. While Olive revels in the attention of pretend skankdom, she craves an actual boyfriend and gets mixed up in the fraught marriage of two of her teachers (Thomas Haden Church and Lisa Kudrow). Bert Royal’s script leans more towards the library than the locker room, with Olive adopting the embroidered ‘A’ for adulterer of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which she’s studying in class, and snappy references to Sylvia Plath and Mark Twain. Will Gluck populates this glorious teen comedy with a gag-tacular cast, ranging from Amanda Bynes’ airheaded Jesus freak to Malcolm McDowell’s exasperated principal. But the whole show is practically stolen by Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson as Olive’s liberal, life-loving parents who are amused by their daughter’s predicament and rather than lecture her keep her spirits up with deliriously funny banter. These are movie parents that everyone wishes they could have. Nick Dent