Top of the class

Director: Will Gluck
Starring: Emma Stone, Amanda Bynes, Penn Badgley, Dan Byrd

Clean-cut high school student Olive Penderghast (Stone) gains unexpected notoriety when she is overheard falsely claiming to have lost her virginity to a community college guy. As rumours start to spread, she later claims to have slept with her gay friend, Brandon (Byrd) in an effort to convince the school he is straight.

Soon, she finds herself with a lucrative career of not sleeping with her nerdy classmates. But things get out of hand and her life starts to resemble the plot of The Scarlet Letter – particularly when
she takes to rebelliously wearing red A’s on her clothes.

While it doesn’t have as many quotable lines as Clueless, and just misses the whip-fast comedic pace of Mean Girls, Easy A stands proudly alongside those two teen girl classics, and provides a cinematic snapshot of the current technology-fuelled speed of the rumour mill, when something tweeted or texted is automatically true, even without a shred of evidence.

Smart, funny and charming. Easy A is a textbook example of how to make a Hollywood teen comedy well: we give it full marks.

Genre: Comedy | Romance
Age Restriction: PG - 13
Runtime: 92 min