FOXFIRE (27)

Directed by: Annette Haywood-Carter

Starring: Hedy Burress, Angelina Jolie

The Pitch: The lives of four high-schoolers are transformed by the arrival in their small town of a fifth teenage girl, a mysterious drifter.

Theo Sez: A true indie, low-key and sometimes lyrical, honest according to its lights and generally uncompromised by box-office considerations ; also, alas, a horribly wrong-headed movie. Its rather naive notion of supportive sisterhood ranged against oppressive men - fathers who abuse our teenage heroines, teachers who harass them, macho classmates who try to rape them - is probably a matter of taste, even if it does result in the girls being presented as rather pathetic victims, endlessly put-upon. What's harder to justify is the way they're viewed in a vacuum, with hardly any sense of their family life or the town that surrounds them, and even school reduced to one-dimensional stereotypes (using frog-dissecting class as shorthand for insensitivity was a cliche even before E.T. - the very idea, if that's possible, is a cliche). What's left is mostly a giggly kind of triumphalist naughtiness, exemplified by the soundtrack snatch of "Trouble" by Shampoo, a sort of proto-Spice Girls - a band whose plastic, meaningless version of "Girl Power" the film often seems uncomfortably close to.