wilkes

For all its beautifully established mood, this film remained, at least for me, curiously unsatisfying-a kind of exquisitely tasteful after-school special.

...an account of youthful disaffection being assuaged by excessive materialism.

...a sly message about America's celebrity culture, a food chain subtext that equates the kids with their quarry.

sometimes reminiscent of Adrian Lyne's tragic depiction of latch-key L.A. teens in 1980's Foxes, but Coppola's characters don't draw the sympathy ... nor does it feel as intrinsic of a representation of its time

Sofia Coppola's sly comment on the vapidness of pop culture and a group of teens lost in transition points out our obsession with fame and gets it all right.

The Bling Ring is something new from the Lost in Translation director. It continues her ongoing portraits of teen alienation, but it's also full of big laughs.

The film doesn't celebrate or critique this pervasive culture that values fame and wealth above all things; it simply becomes it, with Coppola as a cinematic anthropologist.

The young actors, including Katie Chang, Israel Broussard, and a very un-Harry Potter-ish Emma Watson, are engagingly blank, and Coppola films their exploits with a smooth and slowly accumulating creepiness.

She neither explains nor excuses nor extols nor excoriates these kids, which would be fine, but she doesn't really examine them either.

Glitzy but superficial dramedy has swearing, alcohol, drugs.

The film's best moments demonstrate just how skilled [Coppola's] become at conveying material longing, even when such yearnings have reached the realm of the perverse.

Where exactly is the drama here? Why tell this story at all?

With so many vicarious celebrations of wealth masquerading as critiques as it is, I think you owe the audience at least the wisp of a point of view, and there's none here. There is no here here.

It's hard not to think, "What idiots."

This is the first time where the director has allowed herself to be so openly contemptuous of the people in her own movie and that judgmental air suffocates The Bling Ring.

'The Bling Ring' occupies a vertiginous middle ground between banality and transcendence, and its refusal to commit to one or the other is both a mark of integrity and a source of frustration.

If it was Sofia Coppola's intention to portray Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, and Audrina Patridge as the unfortunate, sympathetic victims of teens run rampant in The Bling Ring, then, great work?

The Bling Ring is the cinematic equivalent of the vapid, superficial kids it features - all visual panache and minimal substance.

Make no mistake, it is lovely to look at this celebrity bedazzled bit of L.A. crime history for a while. But the movie ultimately leaves you feeling as empty as the lives it means to portray.

[A] weirdly fascinating, beautifully composed film.

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