Sofia Coppola's luminous debut feature situated the young writer-director as her generation's foremost chronicler of the interior lives of young women, and immediately erased (almost) all the ill-will from her presence in The Godfather Part III. Coppola's savvy and subtle adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s acclaimed novel uses the visual language of cinema to weave a more sophisticated tapestry of the Lisbon sisters' ennui and inevitable tragedy. Led by eldest sister Lux (Coppola's muse Kirsten Dunst), the tight-knit clan navigate the trials of adolescence and the suffocating household created by their overprotective religious parents (Kathleen Turner and James Woods). Where Eugenides told their tale through the collective memory of the boys in the sisters' orbit, Coppola's gossamer images let us behind closed doors, into the poisoned private lives that are beyond the boys' imaginings and fantasies. Evoking its 1970s suburban setting through ethereal cinematography and one of the era's best scores, by French touch band Air, this coming-of-age touchstone secured Sofia's place as heir apparent in a sprawling filmmaking family, as well as in the landscape of turn-of-the-century indie cinema.