Let the Right One In

B is for bloodsucking teens
You didn’t have to be Criswell to predict that Catherine Hardwicke’s adaptation of Twilight, the first book in Stephenie Meyer’s insanely popular teen vampire series, would spawn lines around the block during its opening weekend. And it was pretty much a given that the film’s dreamy, well-coiffed hunk of an undead hero—played by dreamy, well-coiffed hunk Robert Pattinson—would inspire legions of girls to scream themselves hoarse. The bigger surprise was that we’d get not one but two stories of alienated-adolescent-as-creature-of-the-damned metaphor: Let the Right One In, which features another story of romance and open jugular veins. The import doesn’t exactly scream “new franchise,” though the latter’s climactic slaughter in a public swimming pool admittedly had us shrieking like hopped-up tweeners.

NEXT: C is for critics»