Kurt Loder on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Young Adult

Despite the cascade of critical praise splashing down on the new Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, writes Kurt Loder, it's not hard to imagine the movie being greeted with bafflement, and possibly boredom, by many viewers, especially those who've never read the 1974 John le Carré spy novel on which it's based, or who are unfamiliar with the 1979 BBC miniseries of the same name, which is superior in every way.

In Young Adult, on the other hand, director Jason Reitman and his Juno scribe Diablo Cody attempt something tricky. The movie stars Charlize Theron, a rare big-screen beauty who's willing to subvert her looks in order to fully inhabit a difficult character. She did it once before to play a grotesque real-life killer in the 2003 Monster (for which she won an Oscar), and she does it again, in a different way, in Young Adult. Only this time, Loder writes, she portrays a woman whose ugliness is all on the inside.