Juno: Critic Reviews

A blithe charmer balanced somewhere between a life-should-be-so-neat fairy tale and a life's-a-real-bitch tragicomedy.

Juno respects the idiosyncrasies of its characters rather than exaggerating them or holding them up for ridicule.

The engaging story, coupled with the character's likable quirkiness, makes for a film bristling with vitality and heart, without resorting to glibness or sentimentality.

It transcends its own genre. Only superficially a teen comedy, the movie redounds with postmodern -- but emotionally genuine -- gravitas.

That smart, hip, human comedy you've been waiting for all year? The one with dialogue like a sugar rush and performances like grace notes? It's called Juno and it just arrived in theaters. Go forth and multiplex.

By the end, it's unexpectedly moving without ever once trolling for crocodile tears. It's a sneak attack.

It is certainly the feel-good movie of the season, and credit for that goes to the gifted [director] Reitman, novice screenwriter Diablo Cody and the film's sensational lead actress, Ellen Page.

Juno is unerring, compassionate and funny as heck.

Prepare yourself for the Juno generation.

Juno is a coming-of-age movie made with idiosyncratic charm and not a single false note.

A fresh, quirky, unusually intelligent comedy about a 16-year-old girl who wins our hearts in the first scene.

It takes Juno about 15 minutes to calm down and get its joke reflex in check. ... And by the end you've fallen in love with the thing.

The movie is distinctive for its complicated emotions.

What kind of movie is Juno? The rarity that plucks your heartstrings while tickling them.

Juno invites you into a world you won't want to leave.

Juno is the best movie of the year. It's the best screenplay of the year, and it features the best actress of the year working with the best acting ensemble of the year.

Once [Page] - and her character - move beyond the too-cool-for-school act, Juno becomes something special, and memorable.

Juno represents an almost magical configuration of very talented people with very much the same brand of whipsaw humor.

The snappy, new wave dialogue and a sprightly cast that considers suburban insanity as normal as an addiction to nasal spray and one-calorie breath mints turns Juno into an incendiary comic spree.

Dialogue and pic overall are saved from cloying glibness by the fact that Juno is not only a smarty-pants, but also genuinely smart and self-possessed, even if her condition occasionally threatens her composure.

Hollywood's Woman of the Year is a pregnant 16-year-old, the incredibly hip, smart-mouthed and totally endearing heroine of the wise and witty Juno.

The best thing about this movie is that for all its wiseacre badinage, it's utterly believable about the most basic of human situations.

The film's forced quirkiness constantly threatens to derail the entire enterprise. But it keeps being put back on track by the apparently effortless performance of a great young actress.

This is an indie crowd pleaser that's much more enjoyable -- in other words, not nearly as horrifying -- as Little Miss Sunshine.