It doesn't seem a moment since a youthful Roberts was portraying wacky young women triumphing over adversity in love and life in any number of hit movies.

So it's a bit of a surprise to see her as a Hollywood grand dame with pushy upstarts and ambitious whippersnappers like Dunst and Stiles coming up on the rails.

She comes-face-to-face with the New Girls on the Block as Katherine Watson, a bohemian Californian teacher taking up a new post.

The all-women Wellesley College, whose real-life alumni include Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright, is a starchy bastion of rigorous academia.

However, it is also - as one student adroitly puts it - "a finishing school disguised as a college" with every graduate expected to tie the knot and pick up the duster.

More a 1950s St Joan than St Trinians, Katherine's art class make your average University Challenge team look like the Bash Street Kids.

There's the impossibly bright Joan (Stiles), whose aspirations of studying law at Yale seem destined to be stymied by her impending nuptials while the savvy and provocative Giselle (Gyllenhaal) is in search of a role model.

Katherine's nemesis shapes up as the snobbish and ultra conservative Betty (Dunst), who delights in a new-fangled washing machine¿and spouting old-fashioned views in the college rag.

The very foundations of the venerated school are shaken when Katherine introduces the girls to Van Gogh and takes them on a trip to a dripping warehouse gallery to see a Jackson Pollock.

However, her "subversive" teaching methods have been noted and the arch-conservatives among the governors don't like what they are hearing. Or, more correctly, seeing.

Four Weddings and a Funeal director Mike Newell works from a fairly narrow palette - it's basically a feminist take on Dead Poets Society.

However, Roberts brings her impeccable comic timing and repertoire of winning smiles and laughs to the party while her young challengers give her a run for her money.

Not quite as pat as your customary chick-flick, if you ignore some lazy stereotypes there's enough to draw on.

Tim Evans