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All the high-school stereotypes are pleasingly present and correct for this otherwise original teen movie; there's the bitch, the jock, the rebel and the geek. The difference here is the setting. American Eagle High is a strict Christian school with a trendy preacher as principal (Pastor Skip, played by Martin Donovan), where discovering that you're pregnant or gay will get you sent for moral re-education or “degayification”. Brian Dannelly's debut movie is, for its first two thirds at least, a scabrous look at the intolerance and hypocrisy of some fundamentalists. The cast is uniformly likeable (there's a particularly good turn from Macaulay Culkin as a wheelchair-bound cynic) and the screenplay delivers sharp dialogue and a host of good jokes. The fact that it pulls its punches at the end will come as a relief or an irritation depending on your viewpoint, but there's still a lot of fun to be had on the way.

Mild satire of religious fundamentalism that runs out of jokes at the halfway mark and, as if frightened of its own daring, retreats into a soggy sentimentality.