You’ll Never Walk Alone: ‘Heavenly Creatures’ and the Power of Teenage Friendship

Peter Jackson shows the girls interacting and playing in these worlds. “The Fourth World” is a beautiful garden. Borvonia is a dark and delightfully wicked world of castle intrigue and courtly love. Seeing the girls in the worlds they’ve created demonstrates the extent of the fantasies and the pleasures their imaginative and playful friendship brings. Pauline and Juliet have an intense friendship; they don’t want anyone to stand in their way of spending time together or stop the joy that it brings for them.

Female Friendship: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts for our Female Friendship Theme Week here.

When Friendships Fray: ‘Me Without You,’ ‘Not Waving But Drowning,’ and ‘Brokedown Palace’

Not all friendships are built to last. Teenage friendships are little romances between two people–tiny beautiful, impossibly fragile things that break apart upon touch or close examination. Just as a true romantic relationship between two unformed people rarely lasts, so often we grow out of our early friendships. Because so much of growing up means developing into a person who can live in the world, films about the ends of friendships can be just as satisfying coming of age stories as the typical narratives of beginnings. Each ending after all, is the beginning of something else.

When Girlhood Fantasy Turns Murderous: ‘Perfect Sisters’

It’s no easy feat to make a true crime film that rises above Lifetime schlock. It takes things like dark humor, broader social context, impressive cinematography and storytelling risks to breathe life into a stale murder plot. With that goal, ‘Perfect Sisters’ isn’t exactly a blazing success, often falling into the trap of domestic melodrama, but I think it’s still worth a watch.
Based on a notorious Canadian case where teenage sisters drowned their mother in a bathtub, it’s the story of Sandra (Abigail Breslin) and Beth (Georgie Henley), sisters whose whole world is each other.

LGBTQI Week: Stranger in a Queer Land: How ‘But I’m a Cheerleader’ and Susan Sontag Defined My Trembling Identity

This is a guest review by Eva Phillips. It might come off as a bit absurd, even an effrontery to some, to suggest that a film in which RuPaul must resist the titillation of a faux-fellatio on a pitchfork and bigotry is gleefully bellowed in the hate mantra “Silly faggots, dicks are for chicks!” is … Continue reading “LGBTQI Week: Stranger in a Queer Land: How ‘But I’m a Cheerleader’ and Susan Sontag Defined My Trembling Identity”

LGBTQI Week: Cracks

This is a guest review by Emily Campbell. This is a story about lesbian schoolgirls. Those of you who have already seen Lost and Delirious, The Moth Diaries, D.E.B.S., Therese and Isabelle, Fucking Åmål, But I’m A Cheerleader, Heavenly Creatures, Bilitis, and every other lesbian schoolgirl film out there, just hear me out and try … Continue reading “LGBTQI Week: Cracks”