Easy A Directed by Will Gluck A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop Directed by Yimou Zhang An A-is-for-acceptable redo of The Scarlet Letter, and a buck-toothed remake of Blood Simple

High school. A redhead who feels invisible. Trash talk, misunderstandings, helping geeks boast that they scored, and, of course, a seemingly unattainable cool guy. No, it’s not Sixteen Candles or Pretty in Pink but Easy A, a sex comedy that’s purportedly based on The Scarlet Letter but owes a bigger debt to a certain king of ’80s teen angst. He’s even referenced by Olive, our lovely nerd protagonist: “Just once I want my life to be like an ’80s movie,” she says in a video confessional. “But nooo—John Hughes didn’t direct my life.”

Is she sure about that? With Superbad’s Emma Stone playing the heroine—good-looking, funny, whip-smart, but lonely—you can’t help but think of the travails of Molly Ringwald, yet the parallels are not so heavy-handed as to sink what by reasonable expectation should be another throwaway teen movie. (Particularly one that’s penned by a green screenwriter, Bert V. Royal, and directed by Will Gluck, executive producer of last year’s awful Fired Up!)

Not terrible doesn’t equal indelible, however; Easy A is simply an agreeable and relatively witty surprise. Much of the credit goes to Stone, a unique, husky-voiced beauty who can rattle off beyond-her-years chatter without making it sound script-clever. When the film begins, Stone’s Olive is a self-described “anonymous” good girl, besties with a bit of a bitch (Aly Michalka) but otherwise the straight-A type with progressive parents (Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson) and, of course, her virginity. But when she lies about a date to get out of camping with her friend, the fib—as fibs must—gets more involved. Yes, they had fun. Yes, they kissed. And yes, they went all the way. Whoops, did Olive say that out loud?

Olive really spent the weekend hanging out in her room, but the story of losing her V-card travels fast and furiously, and is of particular interest to a holier-than-thou Christian classmate (Amanda Bynes) and every boy who shares the same hallways. When Olive can’t rein in the rumor, she decides instead to own it. Her modest wardrobe is ditched for the “whore couture” of corsets and short shorts. And, like the similarly bedeviled character in the novel her lit class is studying, Olive adorns her tops with a Hester Prynne-pretty “A.”

Then Olive starts...helping guys out. First it’s a gay classmate (Dan Byrd) who wants to pass as straight; together they jump on a bed and grunt behind closed doors at a party. Then it’s other outcasts who wouldn’t mind a bad reputation, giving Olive money or gift cards in exchange for the right to say they fooled around with her. Obviously, things are going to get out of control, keeping Olive from a romance with Todd (Penn Badgley).

At times Easy A feels more grown-up than its main characters, from all the ’80s references (do girls still read Judy Blume?) to the fact that its sharpest moments come when Olive is interacting with adults. Thomas Haden Church, as Olive’s favorite teacher, gets off a few zingers, and Tucci and Clarkson’s Mr. and Mrs. are not only more well-rounded than most comedy prop parents, they’re as funny as Olive. (Dad describes his daughter’s new look as “stripper, but a high-end stripper. For governors and athletes.”) With its best parts relegated to the sidelines, the film’s central plot at times feels a bit neglected, and overall leaves little impression except that Stone is a star. But we already knew that.

A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop Directed by Yimou Zhang

Ever watch a Coen brothers film and think, “Gee, this would be a lot better if the characters had buck teeth and fell down a lot?” Then you may love A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop, Yimou Zhang’s adaptation of Blood Simple. Trading the Coens’ wit for slapstick, the acclaimed Hero and House of Flying Daggers director delivers a story of deception and murder that’s never as chilly as it is broad and bizarre.

Taking place in a remote part of China near the Great Wall, the plot, at least, is nearly point-for-point. Wang (Dahong Ni) is the wealthy owner of a noodle shop and abusive husband to his much younger (and unnamed) wife (Ni Yan). She, obviously, is not particularly fond of Wang and starts an affair with Li (Xiao Shen-Yang), one of his goofy employees. She also buys a gun for protection that she keeps hidden in the shop.

Wang finds out about her infidelity and bribes a policeman (Honglei Sun) to kill her and Li. Instead, the cop fakes their deaths and kills Wang with the intention of stealing the rest of his money. When Li happens upon Wang’s dead body, he freaks, makes assumptions, and freaks some more, pretty much until the end of the film.

Besides Wang, the officer, and to some degree the wife, these characters are cartoons, from the pirate-y Persian gun salesman to Wang’s two other employees, a roly-poly, giant-toothed dimwit and a pig-tailed naïf who conspire to steal the pay owed them from Wang’s safe. When the intended comic reliefs aren’t gasping and flailing, the film is largely wordless, including a lengthy, snoozy overnight sequence in which most of the action takes place. Except “action” is a stretch: These dirty deeds go down slow, focused mainly on the cop’s attempts to get Wang’s money, the employees’ attempts to get Wang’s money, and Li’s valiant if scampering attempts to cover up what he believes his lover did.

It’s an exhausting effort, with all of the Coens’ labyrinthine developments and none of their noir flourish. What Zhang can be proud of is the cinematography by his go-to Oscar-nominated collaborator, Xiaoding Zhao. Frequent and stunning overhead shots include a balletic noodle-making scene and a horse-drawn cavalry traversing the wall in a blue-gray twilight; when the scenery isn’t dusky, it’s brightly multicolored, though too often that means the antics take on a circus-like tone. The problem: “Circus” and “antics” aren’t exactly the kind of words that should be associated with a story as dark as Blood Simple’s, and neither are “woman,” “gun,” and “noodle shop.”