The comparisons seem inevitable, what with Thora Birch playing another brooding high-school
outsider. This time, she's Enid Coleslaw (an anagram for Daniel Clowes, author and artist of the
Ghost World graphic novel), the kind of sharp-witted slacker who makes tsk-tsking
teachers say, "But she has so much potential." Which is true, of course, yet Enid seems less
concerned with deciding what she wants to be when she grows up than with making sense of who
she is now.

Stuck in the summer purgatory that separates high-school graduation from the onset of Real Life, Enid and her best friend Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) must find themselves, independently.
While Enid suffers through a remedial art class, Rachel "evolves" effortlessly. She craves her own apartment and covets the shopping-mall chic. "You get totally sick of all the creeps and losers and weirdos," she tells Enid from across the counter of her trendy new coffee-shop job. "But those are our people!" Enid objects.

Creeps, losers and weirdos seem to be director Terry Zwigoff's specialty (see Crumb,
his documentary portrait of alarmingly dysfunctional underground cartoonist Robert Crumb). He
populates Ghost World with a menagerie of everyday freaks -- Steve Buscemi as the
pathetic record collector, Teri Garr as the nightmarishly cloying stepmother, Dave Sheridan and
his mullet. In real life, such eccentrics define our boundaries and shape the kind of people we
allow ourselves to become. And in its comic genius, Ghost World is observant enough
to notice.

[as featured on Moviefone.com]