Twilight

Let's be honest. Which of us, in our impressionable teenage years, has not displaced an irrational horror of sex into a freaky emo crush on a moody vampire with sky-high cheekbones and a taste for human blood? I mean, haven't we all - in a very real sense?

Since her celebrated 2003 film Thirteen, director Catherine Hardwicke has accumulated some expertise in the dark side of adolescence and puts it to good use in this wildly enjoyable new film, an adaptation of the bestselling young-adult novel by Stephenie Meyer. Twilight is mad, bad and deeply unwholesome to know, and perhaps, in its serious way, the most entertaining teen film since 10 Things I Hate About You. It is certainly a new twist on the time-honoured nice-girl-bad-boy storyline. Virginal lovelies from the right side of the tracks have been conceiving the hots for unsuitable guys since Olivia Newton-John in Grease, Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing and Claire Danes in TV's My So-Called Life. But this is something else: an outrageous story of young love played absolutely straight, and actually better and more convincingly acted than many of the ponderous grown-up "relationship" movies we have to sit through. It sports with the high school genre and America's pro-abstinence True Love Waits movement. But it's got something other than satire on its mind.