How could anybody who has seen it not love ‘Juno’? It’s so well written, so well acted, so funny, and so touching. I was smitten from the funky opening credits and music score to the closing duet.

Having heard about it for months, seen clips, listened to interviews, I was still unprepared for its collective geniality. Every character is fully realized. No one makes a false move. The potential adoptive parents were the biggest surprise for me. I didn’t expect to care about them as much as I did. I loved the wife’s passionate determination to get her baby, and the husband’s nuanced stripping down to his gifted immaturity.

Juno’s father and stepmother are agreeably winning. Her boyfriend is charmingly clueless. Her cheerleader girlfriend is a fitting sidekick. And Juno herself is, of course, the most balanced and levelheaded character of them all – tuned into herself and her surroundings in a way that portends disillusion as well as loneliness

She is, indeed, the Holden Caulfield of her generation. Wise and sad and goofy and alienated – the latter being her saving grace.