Juno (Grade: B)

Accidental pregnancies are all the rage this year at the movies. This summer we had Knocked Up, and just in time for awards season director Jason Reitman serves up Juno, a film that's gotten extremely positive press since it premiered at this year's Toronto Film Festival. Ellen Page (Hard Candy) is wonderfully snarky as the title character, a 16 year old girl who consults the want ads to handpick a pair of yuppies (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) to parent her unborn child. Garner delivers her best performance yet as the anxious and vulnerable adoptive mother, and Allison Janney is terrific as Juno's smart-ass stepmother.

Screenwriter Diablo Cody is getting raves for her script, and she just won the National Board of Review's award for Best Screenplay. Indeed the film is brimming with great-one liners and some genuinely moving scenes, but Cody's insistence on folding heaps of sarcasm and heartwarming blather into one big burrito makes for a mushy mix at times. Juno is much better than Little Miss Sunshine - last year's Little Indie That Could - but it falls short of greatness because it wants to be quirkier-than-thou and an enormous crowd-pleaser all at once, and there's just no way to do that without piling on some of the schmaltz that it sets out to obliterate.