Between “The Virgin Suicides” and “Marie Antoinette,” it was already quite clear that Sofia Coppola loves watching Kirsten Dunst struggle to make peace with some kind of purgatory. In “The Beguiled,” the mustiest and most conventionally entertaining film of Coppola’s brilliant career, Dunst is once again cast as a woman with so much to give and nowhere to go, but this is the first of her characters who actually has a legitimate hope of escaping from her limbo.

Alas, peace can be hard to come by in the middle of a war, and freedom even harder. And if Edwina Dabney wants to get herself out of the Confederacy, she might have to let the Union inside first.

Ruthlessly shorn from…

"Is he dead?"
"No. Not yet."

Much more playful & much less suspenseful than the trailer would lead you to believe. By telling this story through the eyes of the women, Coppola is able to milk the comedy of the situation. I mean, imagine being a young, chaste girl with very little exposure to men, and then Colin fucking Farrell suddenly shows up in your home. Not to mention he's injured, weak, and seemingly downright pleasant.

Of course, nothing is ever this simple. We know going into this film, as it is a retelling of the eponymous 1966 novel, that this is not going to end well. These "vengeful bitches" add a femininity (in the conventional sense of the word) to…