In theaters

MEAN GIRLS, directed by Mark Waters, written by Tina Fey, based on the book “Queen Bees and Wannabes” by Rosalind Wiseman, 93 minutes, rated PG-13.

Pop culture has taught us plenty about mean girls.

Mean girls are controlling, crafty and insincere. They’re sexually promiscuous and duplicitous, vain kittens who use their feminine wiles to reach higher positions of social status while, in the process, striving toward some sort of empty notoriety.

If you examine the Hollywood stereotype, mean girls might have model good looks, but inwardly, they’re a wart. They’re riddled with such overwhelming insecurities, much of their focus is either on their bodies or on what they wear.

To that end, most mean girls have a compulsive need to shop – some might say relentlessly, compulsively, even professionally – which temporarily distracts them from the truth of who they are while also filling large voids in their lives.

It’s just that stereotype that’s bolstered in Mark Waters’ “Mean Girls,” a funny satire peppered with a few savage insights into how cruel teen girls can be to one another. The movie isn’t nearly as mean as it could have been – it’s no “Election,” for instance – but it does make its point that girl fighting can get downright dirty if the opportunities present themselves.

The movie stars Lindsay Lohan as 16-year-old Cady Heron, a nice girl who has been home-schooled her entire life until her family moves from Africa to Illinois.

There at her new high school, she’s befriended first by Goth geeks Janis (Lizzy Kaplan) and Damian (Daniel Frazese) before her good looks attract the Plastics, a trio of mean girls led by the vicious Regina (Rachel McAdams).

When Janis and Damian convince Cady to infiltrate the group and get the goods on the girls, she does so blindly yet willingly – and thus unwittingly sets herself up for the seductive pull of popularity, what it takes for some to achieve it and how ugly it can be to maintain it.

The movie was written by Tina Fey of “Saturday Night Live,” who also co-stars as Ms. Norbury, a math professor caught in the passive-aggressive cattiness that unfolds when Cady’s meddling interferes with the all-important high school hierarchy.

It’s Fey’s examination of that peculiar caste system that gives “Mean Girls” the layers a lesser film would have lacked. She knows the ridiculous importance that’s placed on who sits where in the cafeteria, for instance, and she knows that social suicide in high school can be committed merely by acknowledging the wrong person. Fey sees the humor in that, but she also sees the danger, the absurdity and the pain it can cause.

As such, “Mean Girls,” in all its episodic parts, has the air of a memoir, and it likely will feel sufficiently familiar to some of those who watch.

Grade: B

On video and DVD

THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE, written and directed by Sylvain Chomet, 80 minutes, rated PG-13.

Sylvain Chomet’s Academy Award-nominated “The Triplets of Belleville” was one of last year’s bright highpoints, and while it lost Best Animated Picture to “Finding Nemo,” it is in many ways a better, more accomplished movie.

The film employs elements of the past, spins them on an axis corked with quirks and forges a new direction for contemporary animation. It’s terrific.

Beginning in 1950s Paris, “Triplets” opens with the stout, club-footed Madame Souza trying her best to raise her glum grandson, Champion, a restless French boy whose utter boredom is given only a modest reprieve when Souza buys him a bumbling dog named Bruno. Things look up when she purchases the boy a tricycle and then watches – with blinking satisfaction – as his face at last glows with life.

Years later, Champion is a sleek adult in training for the Tour de France when he’s suddenly kidnapped by a mysterious group of thugs who want to use him in a gambling ring. It’s up to Souza and Bruno to track him down, with each journeying to the strange, terrifying metropolis of Belleville in an effort to save him.

There, they come upon the triplets of the title, a good-humored, former vaudeville act now crooked with age and, one expects, more than a bit crazy. Their diet, for instance, is a horror show of blown-up frogs. Still, they’re a well-connected bunch – and they become crucial to the plot in ways that won’t be revealed here.

On the heels of Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” and the Japanese import, “Spirited Away,” this enjoyably bizarre, mostly hand-drawn movie is the third animated installment in as many years to pointedly shatter the Disney formula. It’s essentially wordless, so you can imagine the challenges that Chomet faced to involve audiences without the hook of dialogue. That he does so is one of the movie’s triumphs, but really, in the end, it’s just the start of them.

Grade: A

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, 5:30 p.m. Thursdays on WLBZ 2 Bangor and WCSH 6 Portland, and are archived at RottenTomatoes.com. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.