Like its title, Nick Guthe's film, Mini's First Time, is an elaborate joke at the expense of the idea of youthful innocence. Remember that? The film takes a hint from Nabokov's Lolita and retells essentially the same story but with the child -- a child grown prematurely cynical from living in the Hollywood snake-pit of wealth and ambition -- as the corrupter of grown-up innocence. Of course I mean innocence in relative terms. Alec Baldwin's Martin has at least some residual sense of what it means to be a father and thus just a smidgen of guilt when he starts sleeping with his high-school-aged stepdaughter, Mini (Nikki Reed). Mini herself, however, having long since ceased to be a child in any but the technical sense, has no idea at all of traditional family relationships. She hates her mother, Diane (Carrie-Anne Moss), an unstable drunk and failed actress whom she addresses as "mommy" only with contemptuous irony.


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There are no prizes for guessing that the ultimate end this moral monster has in her sights is not exactly the Humbert-and-Lo idyll that gives Nabokov's hero his own saving touch of innocence and pathos. The working out of her elaborate plot to get what she does want makes this a tightly-constructed thriller that offers some of the same satisfactions as old-fashioned noir pictures. But noir was long ago divorced from the sense of sin and malign fate that created it and dragged into the sunlight -- specifically the all-forgiving Southern California sun -- where it has never quite managed to retain its old imaginative power.

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James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, media essayist for the New Criterion, and The American Spectator's movie critic. He is the author of the new book, Honor: A History (Encounter Books).