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100It's hard to remember a film that mixes disparate, delicate ingredients with the subtlety and virtuosity of Sofia Coppola's brilliant The Virgin Suicides.
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100Ethereal.
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91Possesses a tone that wobbles masterfully between whimsy, dread, affection and horror, building on rich performances and an understated showiness to cast a queer and tingly spell.
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90(Coppola) connects with the essential purity of Eugenides' story, stripping it down to its bare essentials and cutting straight to everything that's wonderful about it.
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90A lovely, luminous dream.
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90Subtle, strange, off-putting, fascinating.
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90Bewitching.
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89In an astonishingly assured film debut, Coppola captures the poetry and sweetness of Eugenides' novel without allowing any of the standard rites of passage -- first dates, high-school dances -- to feel trite.
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88(Coppola) has the courage to play it in a minor key.
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It's quite funny, though not in a predictably irreverent way, and it moves along briskly - a little too briskly toward the end.
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88From start to finish there's a shimmer of discovery about it - our discovery of it, Coppola's discovery of how much she can do.
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88It gets under your skin and into your head, and you don't want it to leave.
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80Coppola gives Suicides a haunted quality that is undeniably affecting, a feeling intensified by a wonderfully funny and touching Dunst.
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80Coppola looks beyond the seductive metaphysical puzzle and locates the core of Eugenides's allegory in an obsessive, almost forensic act of remembering, both futile and inexplicably essential.
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80(Coppola) understands the crisp, oblique horror and wistfulness of Eugenides' narrative, plunking down five enchanting princesses into an environment that is anything but magical.
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75An artful blend of '70s detail and dreamlike moodiness makes Coppola's first movie an exceptionally promising directorial debut.
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75Has a great deal of empathy for that excruciating limbo that is female adolescence.
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75There's a melancholy sweetness here, a gentle humor that speaks to the angst and awkwardness of girls turning into women, and the awe of boys watching the transformation from afar.
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75Coppola infuses her movie with a dreamy poetic tone, and deftly translates the essential metaphors of youth, sexuality and death without sacrificing an earthy humor.
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75In contrast to big-screen bummers we see every week, this movie conveys genuine sorrow.
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70Successfully venturesome, but you need to know that it's also a real downer.
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70Humor prevails throughout, but it doesn't deflate the disturbing elements of the tale, which miraculously manages to stay droll, heartfelt and poignant to the end.
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70A very curious and eclectic piece of work--fresh even when it's awkward.
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67Glum and preposterous -- an operatically stilted adolescent martyr fantasy -- and yet, as staged by Coppola, it's well worth seeing.
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60The soundtrack (Heart, ELO, Todd Rundgren, and an original score by the French duo Air) is spot-on and the costume design (pukka shells and knee-socks) is hideously accurate.
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60One major inappropriate casting decision (Kirsten Dunst, who's made a solid leap to young adulthood in "Dick" and "Drop Dead Gorgeous" is cast as 14-year-old Lux?) and an underdeveloped motive for the girls' self-demise left me unaffected.
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60Except perhaps for Lux, who, like The Virgin Suicides itself, is a hothouse flower perishing for want of sunshine and fresh air.
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60While not exactly a cop-out, Virgin may leave some viewers who crave traditional closure with the same hollow ache described by the narrator as follows: "What lingered after them was not life but the most trivial list of mundane facts."
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58While young Coppola is a pro with her camera, she'd be wise to brush up on her storytelling skills.
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57A detective story without a solution and a coming-of-ager without discernable characters.
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50Sofia Coppola, who's directed the film from her own screenplay, narrowly misses making the story work on the screen.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 27 out of 34
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Mixed: 1 out of 34
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Negative: 6 out of 34
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10
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This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.
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10