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The Virgin Suicides: Angelica Huston was brought out too early as an actress, and her credentials as the daughter of John Huston could not save her from an embarrassing debut. She recovered, learned the craft, and the rest is history. Sofia Coppola took Winona Ryder's abandoned part in The Godfather III, and she too was ghastly due to prematurity. Her return, however, is not as actress, but as writer and director, and The Virgin Suicides shows her steady, professional and accomplished. The film is about a Michigan family in the 70s, father and math teacher James Woods, mother and strict Catholic Kathleen Turner, and their five sensitive, beautiful daughters. The Virgin Suicides is ultimately a failure, I'm guessing because an attempt to capture the inner psyches of the five girls was just too much to bite off for any director and adapter (Coppola wrote the screenplay based on Jeffrey Eugenides' book, which I have not read, and settles on one of the daughters, Kirsten Dunst). But the film captures in an assured fashion the beauty, pain, and even the rapture of early adolescence. Better, Coppolla gets the time down without being gaudy (see Ang Lee's The Ice Storm). Grade: B.
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