The strained mother-daughter relationship in ''Smooth Talk'' is one of the film's highlights, suggesting that envy often translates into hostility.

What makes Laura Dern’s performance the event that it is--one of the finest, most sustained and most shatteringly observed we’ve had this year... it’s rare to have this variety of insights about adolescence from an actress so nearly that age herself.

Not just another youth movie, but a deft dramatization of a Joyce Carol Oates story adapted by a couple of documentary filmmakers in their feature debut.

Williams walks a fine line between total creep and smooth operator in a film that similarly explores the liminal space between fear and desire during female adolescence.