Beguiled, The (15)

Drama

At a girls' school in Virginia during the Civil War, where the young women have been sheltered from the outside world, a wounded Union soldier is taken in. Soon, the house is taken over with sexual tension, rivalries, and an unexpected turn of events.

The critical consensus

Coppola’s most traditional film to date is a heightened, darkly comic, sexually tense drama that flips the male gaze, to show what happens when a man, for once, gets caught in the crosshairs of desire.

(*) Damon Wise, Empire Online, 10/07/2017

Witty, menacing and steamy (in every sense), The Beguiled is an intelligent update and Coppola’s best work to date. Oscars await.

Jane Crowther, Total Film, 11/07/2017

Reflecting its title, The Beguiled is made in such an enchanting and delicate fashion that we don’t realise immediately just how dark and morbid it really is.

(*) Geoffrey Macnab, The Independent, 12/07/2017

Another pristine bauble of melancholy from a remarkable director.

Sophie Monks Kaufman, Little White Lies, 13/07/2017

Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman star in this tremendously watchable tale of a civil war deserter in the US who takes refuge in a girls’ school.

(*) Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 13/07/2017

There are a lot of individual elements to admire in The Beguiled but it still remains hard to take seriously.

(*) (*) Allan Hunter, Daily Express, 14/07/2017

Sofia Coppola’s dreamy, ‘woman’s eye’ adaptation of a US civil war story brings the battleground indoors.

(*) (*) Mark Kermode, The Observer, 16/07/2017