She's All That (1999)

With her big, dark eyes and her precociously self-possessed way of making even dumb dialogue sound smart, Cook comes across like a young Winona Ryder. Good for her, because it means she's destined for better movies than this unconvincing high school romantic comedy, in which she plays a brainy dork who blooms into a potential prom queen when the class president (Prinze) starts courting her on a bet. ''I feel just like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman — except for the whole hooker thing,'' she says, summing up the movie's somewhat snide take on the Cinderella/Pygmalion themes. That line also highlights the tinny artificiality of a feel-good fantasy that became a theatrical hit by playing all the right music and speaking all the right slang. But She's All That has almost no feel for real teen emotions. C-

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