SIXTH time lucky for indie director Gary Winick, who makes the best Woody Allen sex tale in years in the grainy, rough style of a Dogme 95 movie.

Tadpole is a smart and charming comedy of manners from the Upper East Side of New York, made on a minimal budget on digital video with a sense of fun that is impossible to dislike.

The Tadpole of the title is the bookish, besotted, brooding Oscar Grubman (new boy Aaron Sandford). He is 15, super-confident but not cool, obsessed with Voltaire and Henry Miller, fluent in French and uninterested in the doting girls of his age. Instead he has a hopeless crush on his stepmother, Eve (Sigourney Weaver, so who wouldn't have one!).

Like Oscar, scientist Eve studies matters of the heart, in her case physical, in his case emotional. He senses a gap in her life in her bored relationship with his workaholic historian father (John Ritter).

As precocious as his fellow 15-year-old student in Wes Anderson's Rushmore, Oscar believes he could be her Adam, but a snake in the form of Eve's best friend, chiropractor Diane (Bebe Neuwirth) gets there first, seducing him one drunken night.

The use of Woody Allen-style quotation cards for Voltaire bon mots is awkward, the digital filming a tad close to student movie making, but that all adds to Tadpole being a teenage coming-of-age movie. Niels Muller and Heather McGowan's knowing script is a joy, so too is the re-coming of Cheers' Bebe Neuwirth.

Updated: 11:36 Friday, June 20, 2003