Ginger & Rosa (2012)

A viscerally charged movie that foregrounds surface tensions and gripping performances, Ginger and Rosa is the filmmaker's most accessible and technically surefooted work to date.

It's quietly brutal stuff, beautifully acted by Fanning, Englert, Christina Hendricks and a word-twisting Alessandro Nivola.

Beautiful, yet dark and moving, unsparing, but told with a sympathetic eye, Ginger & Rosa is sometimes relentless in its examination of emotional pain.

This is a teenage movie that could in other hands have been precious; instead it has delicacy and intelligence.

With Ginger & Rosa, Sally Potter manages to avoid nearly every pratfall of such period pieces, focusing on extreme alienation rather than enlightenment, and wringing a powerful and jaundiced coming-of-age story from the decade's less trod corners.