Editor’s note: Daniel Walber’s review originally ran during NYFF 2012, but we’re re-running it as the film’s limited theatrical release begins this weekend. The personal is political. This adage, one of the seminal concepts to come out of the Feminist Movement in the late 1960s, began with a very specific meaning. The idea was that, given oppression on a societal level, the specific problems facing women in their daily lives necessarily took on larger significance. While it wasn’t actually written down until a 1969 essay by Carol Hanisch, it had been an unspoken truth for a long time. Seven years earlier, when the Cuban Missile Crisis rocked the world’s already fragile sense of security, it manifested in the way that revolutionary men took to the streets yet still expected nothing more of the women in their lives than a well-cooked plate of food and a prompt cup of tea. In her new film, Sally Potter takes stays true to the initial spirit of that revolutionary aphorism while simultaneously making it double. Ginger and Rosa  tells the tale of a teenage girl adrift in London during that panic-stricken summer of 1962. With a relaxed sense of style and a precisely poetic screenplay, Potter has created a film of twinned metaphors. The personal crises of her characters stand in for the anxieties of a nuclear world, while the activist Left and its political struggles against the bomb echo the deeply intimate troubles of teenage love and family strife. The personal becomes political while

Let us pause a moment to reflect on the fallen… Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), Eragon (2006), The Golden Compass (2007), The Seeker: The Dark is Rising (2007), City of Ember (2008), The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008), Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (2009), I Am Number Four (2011) These are all movies adapted from the first books of best-selling, young adult fiction series, and while each of them had hopes of spawning cinematic franchises along the lines of Harry Potter and Twilight… all of them failed. The high rate of disappointment hasn’t quenched Hollywood’s thirst though, and many, many more YA adventures are hitting screens in the next few years. The newest one, and happily, one of the best in some time, is the supernatural themed Beautiful Creatures. The film follows the destined but doomed romance between a mortal teen yearning to escape his backwater hometown and a girl whose upcoming sixteenth birthday will see her claimed by either the forces of light or the patrons of the dark.

Both leads in Beautiful Creatures are relative newcomers, but actress Alice Englert is more of an out-of-nowhere choice for such an anticipated adaptation. She’s been garnering raves for her performances in festival favorites like Sally Potter’s Ginger & Rosa and the recent Sundance debut In Fear, but otherwise this Thursday will really mark her introduction to general moviegoers. And I’ll admit, she’s excellent in Beautiful Creatures, standing out as a dramatic centerpiece amidst the enjoyable over-the-top stints by Jeremy Irons, Emma Thompson and Emmy Rossum. Between that, the other two features I mentioned and Roland Joffe’s upcoming Singularity, the 18-year-old could very well be the next big thing, and perhaps the best of such since Jessica Chastain. So, where did she come from? Very literally she came from Jane Campion, the Oscar-nominated director of The Piano. She even had her first real starring role in one of her mother’s films, the short The Water Diary, which is part of the feature-length omnibus 8. While IMDb credits this as Englert’s first work, she actually made her debut in an earlier short from 2001, Paul Maling’s Listen. You can watch that in full over at Alice-Englert.org. After The Water Diary, she appeared in one more short before the hiatus that led up to this year’s heavy output. That one, Hannah Cowley’s Flame of the West, does not appear to be available online anywhere, but you can check out a trailer that barely features the actress here.

We can never really know the truth behind another person’s eyes. Even friends and lovers who’ve shared laughs and beds for decades and think they know it all will never be completely aware of each other’s inner thoughts. So where does that leave a new couple still fumbling with the other’s strengths, weaknesses and behaviors? And what happens when that still fresh couple are dropped into an uncertain and terrifying situation? Tom (Iain de Caestecker) and Lucy (Alice Englert) only met two weeks ago, but the two hit it off well enough that when he asks her to join him for a road trip to a music festival she accepts with only the slightest hesitation. The plan is to meet other friends and camp the night before the fest begins, but cheeky bastard Tom surprises her with a hotel reservation in the Irish countryside. As the hours wear on they find themselves driving in circles, befuddled by seemingly contradictory hotel signs and growing more tense by the minute. Soon irrational fears become concrete as they find themselves targeted by one or more menacing but briefly glimpsed strangers. When it comes to loyalty and trust, where does the line between uncertainty and liability start?

Coasting freely through the festival circuit, Sally Potter‘s Ginger and Rosa earned a lot of accolades, including from our own reviewer. The film focuses on two girls (Elle Fanning and Alice Englert) who dress the same, keep their hair the same length and otherwise stick as close as best friends can. Set in the Nuclear 60s, their paths start to diverge after Ginger’s peace activist father stirs the pot with bad parenting and undeniable charisma. The trailer (via The Playlist) gives us all a strong idea of why the film captured so much attention. Both inwardly emotional and outwardly provocative, the power of this story is on full display alongside a stellar cast. Check it out for yourself:

In a surprising move, Alcon Entertainment has quietly replaced the male lead in their upcoming big screen adaptation of Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl‘s “The Caster Chronicles” novel, Beautiful Creatures. British actor Jack O’Connell was first set for the role of Ethan Wate back in February (along with lead actress Alice Englert), but Deadline Burlington now reports that he’s been replaced by Alden Ehrenreich. There’s no word on just why the replacement has occurred. Ehrenreich has been on the cusp of stardom since Francis Ford Coppola cast him in 2009′s Tetro, and he’ll next be seen in the director’s Twixt. Beyond that, Ehrenreich has only lined up a few other roles, including a supporting role in Chan-wook Park’s Stoker and a starring spot in Melanie Shaw’s Running Wild, so this casting should prove to be a huge boost for his career. The film is set in small town Gatlin, South Carolina and it follows the intersecting lives of Lena (Englert) and Ethan (Ehrenreich) after the bewitching Lena moves to town. Lena is apparently in possession of some sort of supernatural power as a “Caster,” one that endangers both her and Ethan after they fall for each other and discover a family curse that involves both them and most of Gatlin.

Sometime around 2008, when The Twilight Saga was proving to be beyond bankable, bookstores were deluged with a bevy of YA titles that all seemed hellbent on capturing the presumed magic of Stephenie Meyer’s series. As if some of their plotlines didn’t already sound interchangeable enough (magic, mythical creatures, forbidden love, weak characterization), most of their cover art looked oddly similar – which is why I can recall seeing the covers of Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl‘s Caster Chronicles series, but never happened to pick them up to take a look. It looks like I might need to change that, at least if I want to stay current with my YA-books-getting-turned-into-movies news. The first book in the five-book series is set for a big screen adaptation, thanks to Warner Bros. and Alcon Entertainment, and while Beautiful Creatures already got a major credibility bump when Viola Davis joined its cast last week, now the real news is out – who will star as the leads in yet another tale of star-crossed lovers. Jack O’Connell (“Skins,” This is England, Harry Brown) and relative newcomer Alice Englert (The Water Diary) are set to play Ethan Wate and Lena Duchannes, respectively. Beautiful Creatures is set in the small town of Gatlin, South Carolina and follows the fortunes of Lena and Ethan after the bewitching Lena moves to town. What I’ve gleaned from some Internet sleuthing is that Lena possesses some type of supernatural power (the fan site CasterGirls tells us that a caster is

Some actors worry about keeping strict control over how the world perceives them and making sure that they don’t get typecast, but Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks seems to think that if you look that good dressed up in the garb of the period, why not follow up your head turning, 60s-set breakout performance with another role steeped in the same decade? To that end, she has accepted a role in director Sally Potter’s upcoming anti-nuke movie Bomb, which tells the tale of a couple of teenage girls who become part of the Ban the Bomb movement and also learn a little bit about free love and their own blossoming sexuality along the way.There isn’t yet any word on what role Hendricks will play in the film, but she joins a cast that already includes Elle Fanning and Alice Englert as the main girls, and is also rumored to soon pick up names like Alessandro Nivola and Annette Bening as well.