Cinema Experts

"On every film I do, whenever there are other girls my age, I think it's definitely up to me to set the pace. That's because I've had a lot of experience and I think there's always a certain amount of professionalism that should be maintained."
Dunst got her start as a child fashion model at the age of three in television commercials. She was signed with Ford Models and Elite Model Management. In a 1988 episode of Saturday Night Live, she played the role of President George H. W. Bush's granddaughter. In 1989, Dunst made her film debut in Woody Allen's Oedipus Wrecks, a short film that was released as one-third of the anthology film New York Stories. Soon after, she landed a small part in The Bonfire of the Vanities as Tom Hanks' daughter. Dunst also did the voice of Kiki in the 1989 anime film Kiki's Delivery Service (in 1997, when it was released in America). In 1993, Dunst played Hedril in the seventh season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Dark Page". She also had a recurring role as a child prostitute, Charlie Chiemingo, on ER.
Her feature film breakthrough came in Interview with the Vampire, a 1994 film based on Anne Rice's novel. The movie featured a scene in which Dunst, then-aged eleven, received her first kiss from Brad Pitt, who was 29. Her performance earned her a Golden Globe Award nomination, the MTV Award for Best Breakthrough Performance and the Saturn Award for Best Young Actress. In 1995 (and again in 2002), she was named one of People magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People. Dunst was also offered the role of Angela in the 1999 Academy Award-winning film American Beauty, but turned it down because she did not want to appear in the film's suggestive sexual scenes or kiss co-star Kevin Spacey. The same year, she had the role of troubled adolescent Lux Lisbon in Sofia Coppola's independent film The Virgin Suicides. In 2000, she played the captain of a cheerleading squad in Bring it On.
Dunst is best known for her portrayal of Mary Jane Watson in the Spider-Man film series based on Stan Lee's comic serial Spider-Man. She portrayed the neighbor and romantic interest of the mild-mannered superhero in the original Spider-Man in 2002. Dunst was generally well-received in the role, and had a now-famous and often-parodied scene in which she kisses the hero while he hangs upside-down from his web. The success of the first film led her to reprise the role in two sequels, Spider-Man 2 in 2004 and Spider-Man 3 in 2007. Dunst initially signed on to appear in three Spider-Man films, and has said that she would not appear in a fourth film unless director Sam Raimi returned to direct.
At the 2002 Mar de Plata Film Festival, Dunst won the Best Actress Silver Ombú for her performance as Charlie Chaplin's love interest Marion Davies in Peter Bogdanovich's The Cat's Meow.
At the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, Marie Antoinette premiered. It was released in North America on October 20, 2006. In the film, her second with director Sofia Coppola, Dunst plays the title character and uses an American accent in the role. Dunst is expected to portray peace activist Marla Ruzicka in Sweet Relief scripted by Lorene Scafaria for Warner Independent Pictures in 2009. She is rumored to have the role of Blondie frontwoman Debbie Harry in director Michel Gondry's upcoming biopic about the band. This would not be Dunst's first foray into music; she made her singing debut in the 2001 film Get Over It, performing two songs written by Marc Shaiman. She also lent her voice to the end credits of The Cat's Meow, singing Henry Creamer and Turner Layton's jazz standard "After You've Gone." In Spider-Man 3, she sings two songs as part of her role as Mary Jane Watson, one as a Broadway actress and one as a singing waitress in a jazz club. She also appeared in the music video for Savage Garden's "I Knew I Loved You".

“So much has been said about the girls over the years. But we have never found an answer. It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls... but only that we had loved them... and that they hadn't heard us calling... still do not hear us calling them from out of those rooms... where they went to be alone for all time... and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”
I'm uncertain why the daughter of a Hollywood icon would select as her first director effort a nearly unfilmable book of linguistic time bombs and nearly unspeakable tragedy. Jeffrey Eugenides's book The Virgin Suicides is one of the underappreciated gems of the 1990s and surely Sophia Coppola must have known that the critics would have it out for anything she did. So Coppola, daughter of Francis Ford, decided to do something unexpected: She made a gem of a movie that's easy to like and complex enough to savour.
Taking place "25 years ago" in "Michigan," The Virgin Suicides tells the story of a group of teenage boys and the Lisbon sisters, whose suicides changed them forever. The book is told with a rather unique choral narrator (the entire story is in the first person plural) which makes it clear that the focus of the story is not the Lisbons, but the boys and their attempts to restructure the events of what must have been their final summer of innocence. Similarly, the film features extensive voice-overs, culled from the book, coming from an unidentified member (or members) of the gang. You might wonder why you're never able to distinguish between any of the four or five or six males who wander through the story, or why at least several of the Lisbon girls also blend together, but rest assured it's intentional. The Virgin Suicides is very much about a baffled collective.
The movie begins with the first suicide attempt of the youngest Lisbon girl. When the doctor examining her asks why should would try to kill herself she offers the simple response, "Obviously, Doctor, you have never been a thirteen year old girl." The book and film are both really about men and how incapable we are of understand what it's like to be a thirteen year old girl or a thirty year old woman or really anything in between. And what's even more frustrating is the fact that women seem to understand men so devastatingly well (a trait perfectly personified in Kirsten Dunst's portrayal of middle sister Lux). The narrative such as it is marches inexorably through the gradual awakening of the narrators and the inevitable realization that they never knew anything.
Coppola, who also adapted the screenplay, makes decent use of the book's two metaphorical subplots - an outbreak of Dutch Elm Disease and a cemetery worker's strike. The rot of suburban life lies at the core of this story and Coppola wisely never overplays her hand. She loves using mythic imagery, generally revolving around Dunst, an actress beginning to produce the kind of resume that speaks of longevity. Coppola's background in costuming is also evident, displaying the decadence and tackiness of the observing characters, contrasted with the spare Puritainism of the Lisbons.
Coppola gets mostly good performances from the young generation of her cast. As the only two characters to get individual notice, Kirsten Dunst and Josh Hartnett do excellent work. She's the animal core of the film and he perfectly captures the perplexed, corrupted purity of the male side of the story. Playing against type, James Woods is excellent as the Lisbon's introverted henpecked father and Kathleen Turner is effectively scary as their domineering mother.The Virgin Suicides has perhaps too many moments of whimsy, where it seems too devoted to its source, even when the material doesn't translate properly. But still, it's the moments of magic - the Lisbon girls prom, an eerie family party, and phone conversation spoken only with records - that stand out… 8/10