The Virgin Suicides: Critic Reviews

Worth seeing.

More than most recent movies about suburban adolescence, The Virgin Suicides catches both the triviality and the grandeur of youth, its prosaic details and its mythopoetic flights.

Coppola's direction engagingly avoids the coming-of-age cliches and the film boasts an excellent performance from Kirsten Dunst.

A very curious and eclectic piece of work.

Sofia Coppola tackles the issue of teenage suicide with an assured treatment in The Virgin Suicides, effectively employing a seriocomic tone.

A lovely, luminous dream.

Intense, imperfect movie about teen suicide.

Sofia Coppola's compelling, ethereal fable about adolescent loss of innocence is claustrophobic and uncomfortable, but profoundly affecting and gently funny. "The Virgin Suicides" advises teen years are sometimes best remembered as a long-ago vacation.

It's yet another case of blame-the-parents, and, more precisely, blame-the-overprotective-mother.

An assured feature debut, this darkly humorous exploration of a tough subject benefits from an original narrative and the fact that the appealing cast consists of actors who are the same age as the characters they play.

The strongest directorial debut of the year.

The tone of wistful regret and longing doesn't preclude a good deal of gentle humour. It's a restrained, subtly suggestive piece which disintegrates if you try to get a fix on it.

A rather stunted and sliggish exercise in style whose sporadically haunting visual quality doesn't make up for its shallowness and ponderous pace.

A stellar debut feature from Sofia Coppola and it's a must see.

Concentration on either the writing or the direction, but not both, may have spawned a better film from first-timer Sofia C.

Mergulhando com sensibilidade na amargura do universo adolescente, com seus anseios e frustracoes, Coppola estreia de forma memoravel na direcao.

A disarmingly poetic - and specifically female - vision of adolescence that it belongs in a category of its own.

Black comedy has never looked so good.

If missteps hold the film back from achieving the full grandeur it aims for, there is no denying the way it conjures a magic-realist American suburbia, rarely before brought so convincingly to life.

If [Coppola's] debut film is any indication, talent does run in the family -- even if it is a somewhat disjointed talent.

In the end, the strengths of the movie are overwhelmed by what is pretentious, unplugged and boring to boot.

A heartbreaking glimpse at the secret life of adolescents... shockingly tender and remarkably acted.

...a tragic fable, as diffuse as an imperfectly remembered dream

When a film's most sensible character commits suicide within the first 15 minutes it cannot be a good sign.

All style, no structure.