By Jay Kuehner Too much sugar ruins the pie! Jason Reitman’s shamelessly saccharine adaptation of Joyce Maynard’s novel could not have resisted such a bromide, as it was baked into the dough. But the earnestness with which certain hackneyed narrative flashpoints are so handily realized turns whatever latent drama the film might have possessed into…

By Adam Nayman In his review of Jason Reitman’s Young Adult, J. Hoberman informs us that its protagonist, 37-year-old hack writer Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), “packs up and drives back to [her hometown of] Mercury, Minnesota, while playing a vintage mix tape heavy on The Replacements.” This is incorrect: the song that Mavis keeps blasting…