Focus Features

An aimless but charming 18-year-old with vague ambitions to become a kick boxer falls hard for the beautiful, unattainable class valedictorian. I can't hear Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" without conjuring up images of a young John Cusack holding up a boom box in the rain, a symbol of undying devotion. Also? Lili Taylor singing "Joe lies." Classic.

Tina Fey before Sarah Palin. Lindsay Lohan before the drugs, the arrests, and the lip fillers. Chlamydia with a "K". Less acerbic and dark than Heathers, the quintessential black comedy about mean girl cliques, but a little more hopeful. And sometimes you have to have some hope, you know?

"So, how abouts we take another snap at hearing your tale?" No modern teen speaks like this. Then again, how many people in the 1940s spoke like Bogart in The Big Sleep? This noir thriller takes a page from Hammett and Chandler with a story about a flawed loner trying to solve the murder of his ex-girlfriend. Yes, this particular loner is still in high school — and so is the ex-girlfriend, the femme fatale, a sage-like informant called "Brain," etc. — but that only underscores the fact that most everyone in high school acts like they're playing a role, and most everything in high school feels like life or death. Plus, Joseph Gordon-Levitt — star of another favorite of mine, The Lookout — rocks. Now won't someone please make a movie about Veronica Mars?

At first, I was worried I'd drown in the stream of self-conscious one-liners that make up the first ten minutes of this movie — ''This is one doodle that can't be undid, home skillet'' — but Ellen Page won me over. And then the movie, about a pregnant 16-year-old giving up her baby for adoption, slowly exchanges clever posturing for surprising depth and morphs into a smart, funny, and moving film about the possibility of true love, responsibility, and the choices that turn us into adults.

The sweetest movie about flesh-eating zombies ever. I might be cheating a bit here, as the main character, played by an unapologetically neurotic Jesse Eisenberg, is already in college and out of his teens. But Zombieland deals with the same feelings of awkwardness, alienation, anxiety and loneliness that teenagers — and the rest of us — deal with every day. Underneath the buckets of blood and gore, Zombieland is about finding a family. As Jesse Eisenberg's character Columbus says, "It's tough growing up in Zombieland." Emma Stone's Wichita replies: "It's tough growing up."