Juno

After the sixteen-year-old titular teen (Page) falls pregnant following some awkward fumbling with her best friend Bleeker (the endearingly puppyish Cera), she opts to give said bun in the oven to the adoptive parents of her choice: a picture-perfect yuppie super-couple who want a tot to complete their pristine, magnolia McMansion. Achingly indie-cool from the obligatory crayon-drawn title sequence to the sunnily lo-fi, zip-a-dee-doo-dah soundtrack, Juno skips blithely around the issues surrounding teen pregnancy to remind us all that there is no problem that cannot be alleviated by a hefty store of sardonic one-liners and a hamburger phone.

Together with Knocked Up and Waitress, Juno fills out the third trimester of an unlikely trilogy of unplanned pregnancy comedies to have graced our screens in recent months. But in contrast to Judd Apatow's sanitised, testosterone-tinged crowd-pleaser, Juno's sweetness and sympathy for its characters has much more in common with the late Adrienne Shelly's deliciously satisfying indie gem. Granted, at times Juno feels a little too self-consciously cutesy, but director Jason Reitman's sharp timing steers the film with a deftness that never allows it to wander off track. The improbably named Diablo Cody – uber-blogger, one-time stripper and debut screenwriter – has crafted a script so snarky-smart that you really don't care that no teenager this side of The Kevin Williamson School for the Lexically Precocious ever actually possessed a verbal virtuosity to match our expectant heroine. Bristling with real originality and a deadpan eloquence, each scene fizzes with Cody's whip-smart hipster patois. If that all sounds a little too cloyingly clever-clever, fear not. Just as the film teeters perilously close to the kind of ill-judged quirk overload that the Napoleon Dynamites of this world are guilty of, Cody's delicate and sharp dialogue allows touches of tenderness and compassion to edge in among all those scene-curling zingers. But it's Ellen Page – terrifyingly self-possessed in Hard Candy and equally impressive here – that the film really stands on, cracking wise with an arch insouciance and managing to balance Juno's laid-back composure with flashes of quiet vulnerability. While never reaching the sublimely cynical heights of Thora Birch in Ghost World, Page's Juno is still a screen teen that fairly glows with a sprightly, snarly vitality that will, I guarantee, make February 2008 seem that little bit brighter. [Laura Smith]