The Good Girl Review

The Retail Rodeo, with its dead fluorescent light and its intercom poetry, is one of the more precisely observed workplaces in American comedy, and Miguel Arteta keeps the camera at the eye level of a bored cashier. Jennifer Aniston strips out every reflex she had built on television and plays Justine as a woman whose flatness is a defense, quiet enough that you watch her decide things a beat before she says them.

Jake Gyllenhaal makes Holden genuinely unsettling rather than sweetly damaged, a boy who has read one novel and built a personality out of it, and the moment his self-mythology curdles into threat is where the film stops being funny. John C. Reilly and Tim Blake Nelson turn stoned couch talk into something close to grief. Mike White's script is sharpest in small transactions, a stolen bottle of Blood of the Lamb, a security guard's Bible study invitation, and weakest when it needs an ending.

The last twenty minutes lean on blackmail and a motel death borrowed from a harder thriller than this one. Zooey Deschanel's announcements over the store PA are the best running joke and the only mercy the film hands out for free.