Elle Fanning

It’s almost as if Warner Bros. was waiting until they could tack on the Cannes Film Festival’s coveted Official Selection palm-leaf to release the new trailer for The Beguiled. Hot on the heels of the news that Sofia Coppola’s latest would make its world premiere on the banks of the Croisette, we’re getting our second major look at this adaptation of Thomas Cullinan’s 1966 novel. (Coppola has made it clear that her film will be an entirely different animal than Don Siegel’s 1971 take on the material.) And from the looks of it, things are not going to turn out so hot for Colin Farrell.

There’s a few reasons the term ‘teaser trailer’ feels especially appropriate when describing the new Sofia Coppola drama The Beguiled. Not only is the average movie-lover excited for a new film from the Virgin Suicides director, the typical Colin Farrell fan hyped for the The Lobster actor to dig into more dramatic territory, or those missing Big Little Lies anxious for new Nicole Kidman; but this movie, about a boarding school quivering with insidious desires and sexual tension, looks to be the epitome of a tease.

Sofia Coppola’s remake of The Beguiled is one of the most intriguing movies hitting theaters this year. The original, made in 1971 and starring Clint Eastwood, is based on an 1866 Southern Gothic novel by Thomas P. Cullinan. Coppola is known for her softly-toned, extremely atmospheric, dreamy filmmaking, and that style coupled with a story that’s weird as all hell is going to make for a fantastic film.

Before The Craft, before the advent of Hot Topic, before the girl in the Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt from Wet Hot American Summer — there was Mary Shelley. The original goth teen has remained a fixture of high school literature curricula on the virtue of her masterpiece Frankenstein, surely the most important text in the English language ever composed as part of a drunken dare. But she lived a rich life beyond the page as well, romancing the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley before marrying him at age 18, and essentially living more freely than women were expected to at the time. Shelley was morbid but funny, lovely but intense, a staunch character begging for the biopic treatment.

Well, would you look at that. Sofia Coppola went and made a proper genre film — transforming her signature dreamy style into something vaguely insidious in the first trailer for The Beguiled. A remake of the 1971 Clint Eastwood film (based on the 1966 novel of the same name), Coppola’s latest stars Colin Farrell as a wounded Union soldier who takes refuge at a southern boarding school headed by Nicole Kidman. And then things…take a turn.

There’s no shortage of kid-friendly movies that promote the importance of following your dreams and achieving your true potential. (I suspect in part because any Hollywood screenwriter who has sold a feature-length script has necessarily realized their dreams — easy for them to say.) Youngsters will get yet another lesson on the absolute vitality of dream-chasing this spring, when the new animated feature Leap! leaps into theaters on March 3. Dreams shall be followed, and what’s more, a little cartoon Dane DeHaan will speak explicitly about following those same dreams, just to be sure that no child leaves the theater unclear. To quote Jon Heder’s answering machine message in the figure-skating comedy vehicle Blades of Glory: if you can dream it, you can do it!

Early in 20th Century Women, Elle Fanning’s rebellious teenager Julie asks, “Don’t you need a man to raise a man?” With little pause, Annette Bening’s single mother Dorothea assuredly responds, “No, I don’t think so.” The latest from Mike Mills (Thumbsucker, Beginners), finds three women helping raise a teenage boy. It’s a premise that could easily crash and burn in the wrong hands by sacrificing nuance for stereotypes or marginalizing female voices to emphasize a male perspective. Yet 20th Century Women avoids all of that. Instead Mills has made not only one of the best films of the year, but one that unabashedly celebrates the feminine spirit.

Sofia Coppola’s latest project already sounds like it could be her most interesting in years, particularly for a longtime fan such as myself who found her last two efforts — Somewhere and The Bling Ring — to be entirely underwhelming (though not without some merit). The director has officially begun production on her next film, The Beguiled, a Civil War-era drama which marks her fourth feature with Kirsten Dunst, and will hit theaters next summer.

It’s 1979 in Santa Barbara: the hippie-dippie ‘70s are about to give way to punk and the wave of nihilism that goes with it, Jimmy Carter frets about a crisis of conscience on the TV set, and one kid’s trying to figure out how he fits into all of it.

You know when a trailer captures a mood of a film so well you just want to roll around in it and soak it up? That’s how the first teaser for Mike Mills’ 20th ‘Century Women’ feels, capturing the aura of a bohemian family in late 1970s Santa Barbara so well you can almost smell the ocean water and patchouli oil.