Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang - film review

Laurent Cantet's moodily mounted adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s novel about a self-destructive teen girl gang in Fifties New York
Guy Lodge9 August 2013

Great directors of world cinema often come unstuck when switching to English-language film, and sadly, Laurent Cantet — whose last film, the tremendous, part-improvised French schoolroom drama The Class, won him a Palme d’Or — is the latest. Not that there isn’t much to recommend this moodily mounted adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s novel about a self-destructive teen girl gang in Fifties New York, from its spiky, untempered feminist charge to its pristine period production design. But Cantet doesn’t seem entirely in control of his young, inexperienced ensemble this time. Individual performances range from striking to self-aware, with interaction often hesitant — a drawback in a story predicated on female unity.

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