Weekend Movie Forecast: Couples Retreat Vs. An Education

Adapted by Nick Hornby from a short memoir by journalist Lynn Barber, An Education tells the true story of a suburban London school girl's romantic affair with a seemingly sophisticated thirty-something gadabout, played with irresistible charm by Peter Sarsgaard, whom we interviewed this week. The critics are overwhelmingly positive, and Scott Foundas at the Village Voice calls Danish director Lone Scherfig's movie "something of a deceptively packaged Oscar-season bonbon—a seemingly benign, classily directed year-I-became-a-woman nostalgia trip that conceals a surprisingly tart, morally ambiguous center. A hit at this year's Sundance Film Festival, where it collected the Audience prize for world cinema, An Education arrives in cinemas at a curious moment indeed for a movie about a headstrong 16-year-old who gives herself willingly to a charismatic Jewish hustler more than twice her age. Whatever will the Roman Polanski lynch mob make of that?"