Directed by Sofia Coppola • 2017 • United States
Starring Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst
Sofia Coppola won the Best Director award at Cannes for her hypnotic adaptation of the novel by Thomas P. Cullinan—the second following Don Siegel’s 1971 Clint Eastwood version—bringing a female point of view and a dreamy, diaphanous style to this tale of repressed desire run amok in a cloistered world of women. The story unfolds during the Civil War at a Southern girls’ boarding school where the sheltered young women take in an injured enemy soldier (Colin Farrell). As they provide refuge and tend to his wounds, taboos are broken and the house is overwhelmed by sexual tension and dangerous rivalries.
Up Next in Southern Gothic
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Eve’s Bayou
Directed by Kasi Lemmons • 1997 • United States
Starring Jurnee Smollett, Meagan Good, Samuel L. Jackson“The summer I killed my father, I was ten years old . . .” So begins Kasi Lemmons’s spellbinding feature debut, an evocative journey into the maze of memory steeped in fragrant southern-gothi...
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The Night of the Hunter
Directed by Charles Laughton • 1955 • United States
Starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian GishTHE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—incredibly, the only film the great actor Charles Laughton ever directed—is truly a stand-alone masterwork. A horror movie with qualities of a Grimm fairy tale, i...
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The Beguiled
Directed by Don Siegel • 1971 • United States
Starring Clint Eastwood, Geraldine Page, Elizabeth HartmanThis chilling, Civil War–set western casts Clint Eastwood stars as a wounded Yankee soldier who finds himself convalescing in a Confederate all-girls school, a charged setup that precipitates...
