[Amy Heckerling] secures from Silverstone the kind of performance to note as more than just promising. But everyone is good in the film, which seems to have a hotline to teenage mores of a certain type.

It’s a loose revamp of Jane Austen’s Emma that buzzes with the kind of emphatic “Valspeak” (Valley Girl parlance) that eventually spread beyond the cinema and helped transform the very rhythm of spoken English.

Silverstone is amazingly innocent and charming and her sublimely weightless screen presence has a kind of serenity and maturity that belongs to an instinctive comedy performer.

Heckerling does not labour the parallels with "Emma," but they give an extra dimension to her buoyant flm and suggest the nature of the enterprise.