Stranger in town: the long-legged, short-haired, fat-lipped Angelina Jolie, introduced on screen, to the whistling and stomping of rain and thunder, in anatomical stages, working upwards from the toes of the boots. "Just passing through," as she laconically puts it, after getting thrown out of school "for thinking for myself," she comes in out of the storm, makes wet tracks to a biology class just in time to rescue a frog from dissection, and follows the amphibian closely out the window. Having thus established herself as leadership material, she goes on to incite a quartet of acolytes to such undreamed-of feats of derring-do as roughing up the sexual molester on the faculty, breaking-and-entering, and commemorating the latter adventure with the ritual tattooing of red flames on five separate breasts. Sisters forever. The director, or chief cheerleader, Annette Haywood-Carter, fills the screen with music-video exhibitionism and empties it of honest observation. The original source material, updated from its Fifties setting, is a Joyce Carol Oates book, but the lightning that struck Smooth Talk doesn't on this occasion come within miles. Hedy Burress, Jenny Lewis, Jenny Shimizu, Sarah Rosenberg. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.