94 minute running time so well within the sacred 100 minute limit. A coming-of-age story set in 1992 … the trouble I had with it is Saoirse Ronan couldn’t pass for a seventeen-year-old in my mind. In every scene, I thought why is this woman in her twenties going to Catholic high school?

There are a lot of cute scenes (the discouraging guidance counselor made me laugh out loud), it’s quirky, but it’s sort of overly precious throughout (though it doesn’t descend into Wes Anderson or Little Miss Sunshine or, god forbid, Noah Baumbach territory.) The class element interested me (east Sacramento versus west Sacramento), going to state college versus some private school in NYC, etc. But I wasn’t that thrilled in the end. Yellow rating.

Hottie from Haifa closer to seventeen than the lass from Dublin