A fanciful teen travelogue with the requisite number of tall dark strangers, Monte Carlo charts a small town girl’s travels through Europe after high school graduation, where she ironically finds herself by assuming another person’s identity. More than a bit silly and contrived, but so agreeably cast and well executed as to certainly mitigate these shortcomings for its core audience, the film is a pleasant slice of re-worked, tween-targeted entertainment — diverging wildly from its source material, a novel by Jules
Bass, and starring Selena Gomez, Katie Cassidy (above) and Leighton Meester — that should find embrace from fans of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, as well as their younger siblings. Gorgeous production design and superb costuming and girlie accoutrements help float this improbably romantic adventure and lend it an airy grace, as does a score from composer Michael Giacchino that classily evokes swirling romance without hitting antecedent influences directly on the nose. (20th Century Fox, PG, 109 minutes)