Review

The teen comedy I Love You, Beth Cooper isn’t screening for critics—not necessarily a fatal sign, since studios aren’t always the best judges of what they have. Although directed by Home Alone company man Chris Columbus, the film was written by Larry Doyle based on his rollicking novel, a blend of extreme masochism and romantic fantasy that chronicles a nerd’s pursuit of a high-school princess (played by Hayden Panettiere) on graduation night. Doyle, a former editor and writer at New York, is—objectively speaking—both scarily brilliant and scarily prickly. Exhilarating, terrible, or both, the movie will be something to see. — David Edelstein