The Virgin Suicides (1999)

"So much has been said about the girls over the years. But we have never found an answer. It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls... but only that we had loved them... and that they hadn't heard us calling... still do not hear us calling them from out of those rooms... where they went to be alone for all time... and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together."

The Lisbons (James Woods, Kathleen Turner) have five teenage daughters -- Lux (Kirsten Dunst), Mary (A.J. Cook), Cecilia (Hanna Hall), Therese (Leslie Hayman) and Bonnie (Chelse Swain) -- ages 13 to 17. The beautiful girls with their mysterious aura have the ability to powerfully obsess the boys at school in their well-to-do 1970s Michigan community, but their parents, rigid Catholics, are wont to allow them to date.
After the youngest, Cecilia, takes her own life, the boys are even more intrigued. While the girls' parents continue their clamp down, Lux secretly becomes more than a little involved with Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett) and gets her remaining three sisters involved with boys hand picked by Trip. The girls, all remarkably determined and strong, are also frighteningly fragile.

What happened then has left the boys, now men after 20 years, still wondering about the whole sequence of events that crushed a family and confused a community.

Others in the cast include Scott Glenn as the family's parish priest, Danny DeVito as the psychologist the family consults, with narration by Giovanni Ribisi.

Poignant, bittersweet, provocative.

Based on a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. Screenplay and directed by Sofia Coppola, her first directorial effort.

Run time: 1 hour, 37 minutes

Rated R for strong thematic elements involving teens.

My personal rating: B