Teens Will Swoon for Twilight

The teen-vampire drama Twilight will “mesmerize its target audience, 16-year-old girls and their grandmothers,” writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. “The movie is lush and beautiful, and the actors are well-chosen.” The story of a girl and her vegetarian-vampire lover focuses on the “fervent, sexually charged but doggedly chaste murmurings” of its stars, writes Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune.

That focus is a great asset to “a film of intelligent strengths and easily avoidable weaknesses,” Phillips adds. The weaknesses? Special effects that look like “a weaker episode from Season 6 of Charmed." But the passion comes through, particularly for teens, writes Kenneth Turan in the LA Times. Director Catherine Hardwicke “has connected so intensely to the [Stephenie] Meyer novel that it's hard to imagine anyone else making a better version.”
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