The tale of Cinderella and her handsome prince is souped-up and fine-tuned to provide a vehicle for the teen franchising opportunity Hilary Duff. A Cinderella Story is relocated to the present-day San Fernando Valley and while Sam, our put-upon heroine, longs for the day when her prince sweeps her off her feet, she’d settle for getting into Princeton. Gosh, it’s practically a feminist manifesto.

Then, when all the other kids are preparing for the Hallowe’en dance, Sam is scrubbing linoleum at the local diner at the behest of her heavily upholstered, surgically enhanced stepmother (Jennifer Coolidge).

What’s worse, Sam could miss out on the chance to finally meet up with the mysterious e-mail buddy whose soulful texts she has been swooning over. What she didn’t anticipate is that her cunning disguise of a white lacy mask would confuse the idiot boy so much he wouldn’t recognise her and would spend much of the film mooning around school in search of his lost love. Every high school cliché in the book is dredged up for this feather-light piece of fluff.

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