Less an updated tale of the dog-eared young-adult mystery serial than a winking love letter to the books' adorably repressed aesthetics, Nancy Drew takes its old-school heroine straight from the pages of the past and into Babylonian, modern-day Los Angeles. When you're milking anachronism, why not do it up all the way, right?

Nerd-heroine Nancy (Emma Roberts) leaves her humble hometown with her father (Tate Donovan) for a temporary LA stay – for which she promises, cross her heart, to quit sleuthing. But Nancy finds the mystery of the haunted mansion she and dad are renting too alluring to deny (or maybe she just has to justify that extensive magnifying glass collection).

It's interesting to see the retrofitted model of so many of today's crime-fighting-teen-with-dead-mother-issues TV characters, but director Andrew Fleming does a graceful job using awkward Nancy as a means to address modern culture with both truth and sarcasm. Roberts is just precocious enough in her role as a self-confident keener (so what if everyone else is using a BlackBerry while she's using a compass?) and the film's loaded with kid's-mystery money shots – secret passages, false bottoms, creepy caretakers – that easily float the lightweight story and rather drippy ending.