Young Adult
Charlize Theron plays a mean girl who returns home to win back her boyfriend in the new screenplay by Diablo Cody.
Directed by Jason Reitman
(R)
***
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
This “edgy, subversive” film “undercuts the conventions of female-centered comedies at each turn,” said Colin Covert in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Most impressively, it “manages to keep us invested” in the story about a “thoroughly unpleasant protagonist.” A brave Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary, a former prom queen who became a writer of young adult novels in the big city but also became a cruel alcoholic. When she learns that her high school boyfriend has had a baby, she returns to her small Minnesota hometown to win him back. Screenwriter Diablo Cody, who won an Oscar for Juno, “specializes in unusual characters who say unexpected things at their own peril,” said Rex Reed in The New York Observer. The results here are uneven, with some of Mavis’s erratic behavior—including a climactic drunken tirade—feeling orchestrated. Still, Theron is “funny and surprising,” said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. It’s a tribute to her “fearless reach and formidable range” that a portrait that begins as wry comedy morphs into “something perilously close to an American tragedy.”
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
Book reviews: ‘Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America’ and ‘How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978–1998’
Feature A political ‘witch hunt’ and Helen Garner’s journal entries
By The Week US Published
-
The backlash against ChatGPT's Studio Ghibli filter
The Explainer The studio's charming style has become part of a nebulous social media trend
By Theara Coleman, The Week US Published
-
Why are student loan borrowers falling behind on payments?
Today's Big Question Delinquencies surge as the Trump administration upends the program
By Joel Mathis, The Week US Published