Third installment in the Twilight “saga,” with a new director, David Slade, not to say new blood, only recirculated blood. The ongoing grooming of Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner as poster boys to be pinned up in pink bedrooms across the land reminds the viewer continually, with pop songs chiming in on the soundtrack, that this is intended primarily if not exclusively for adolescent girls. Maturer viewers might enjoy nodding sagely at the spectacle of a modern Everygirl named Bella, realistically played by Kristen Stewart, to whom you can’t, at that age, tell anything, and who won’t be warned off her heart’s desire by reason, wisdom, foresight, superior experience. And they might take a clinical interest in the mixed signals by which Bella keeps both fellas on the string. There is, as a sideshow, a subplot about a simmering skirmish between vampire clans (“Something terrible is coming”), owing to some unelucidated grudge against Bella that you’re supposed to recall from the previous installment. But the impending slaughter plays strictly second fiddle to the romantic rivalry between Edward the vampire and Jacob the werewolf, and in fact is of any interest whatsoever only for the additional flattery to Bella. The two armies after all, like the two boys, are fighting over her. In the final reckoning the film can best be enjoyed in the way you might enjoy looking at a teenage girl’s Facebook pages or her Twitter entries or, if anyone still keeps one, her dear diary. Best be enjoyed, to say it another way, as documentary evidence of what large numbers of teenage girls enjoy. To be sure, large numbers of teenage girls (not to tar them all with the same brush) will enjoy it in a less detached and dispassionate way. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.