Juno (2007)
★★ — Juno (2007)
Juno arrived in cinemas in late 2007 to a reception that was, to put it mildly, rather enthusiastic. A Fox Searchlight release produced under the Mandate Pictures and Mr. Mudd banners, the film centres on sixteen-year-old Juno MacGuff, a high-school student who faces an unplanned pregnancy and makes a decision that sets the rest of the story in motion. Written by Diablo Cody (who had sold the script on the strength of her blog and memoir) and running at a trim 96 minutes, it was exactly the sort of modestly budgeted indie comedy-drama that Fox Searchlight had built its reputation on, and it performed well beyond most expectations, becoming something of a cultural touchstone for its era.
Behind the camera was Jason Reitman, son of Ivan Reitman and already building a reputation for witty, character-led stories following his debut feature Thank You for Smoking (2005). His direction here is polished but unremarkable, the kind of confident craftsmanship that keeps everything moving without ever drawing attention to itself. In front of the camera, Elliot Page (credited as Ellen Page at the time) takes the title role, and the film really does rest on their shoulders for the better part of its runtime. The supporting cast fills in around them with some recognisable faces: Michael Cera as the quietly awkward Paulie Bleeker, Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman as the couple Juno approaches about adoption, and J.K. Simmons as her characteristically understated father. It is a cast that, on paper at least, seems well-matched to the material. If you want a point of comparison from the same period, I also took a look at Phone Booth, another early 2000s film that leaned hard into a particular kind of stylised writing, and there are one or two similarities worth noting in how both pictures wear their cleverness rather prominently. For something from the same year and era with a completely different register, my thoughts on Transformers are also on the site, if only to illustrate just how wide the 2007 release slate actually was.
Juno picked up four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and Diablo Cody won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. That sort of awards attention tends to cement a film's reputation in ways that can be hard to separate from the actual viewing experience, and it is worth keeping that in mind going in. Whether the film holds up to that level of acclaim, and whether the self-consciously quirky dialogue lands the way it was intended to, is really the question at the heart of any honest revisit. Here is what I made of it.
Just an average teen drama with a quirky script that thinks it’s more profound than it is. Ellen Page (now Elliot) gives a decent performance, and the supporting cast is solid, but the whole thing feels a bit too try-hard. The dialogue is unrealistically witty in that early 2000s indie way, and while it has heart, it never really hit home for me. It's fine. Just not nearly as clever or groundbreaking as people made it out to be.
And honestly, that "it's fine" is probably where I land too, when I strip away the nostalgia and the awards conversation. There is something a little exhausting about a film that mistakes rapid-fire wit for genuine emotional depth, and while Page's performance does carry a fair amount of the warmth the script reaches for, the whole thing can feel like it is trying rather hard to be the coolest kid in the room. I have seen quieter, less celebrated films, including some of the drama and coming-of-age work elsewhere on the site, do something more genuinely affecting with far less noise. Juno is not a bad film. It is just one that perhaps benefited enormously from the right moment, and moments, as we know, have a habit of passing.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2007 | Watched: 2025-04-15
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Juno (2007) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
