Carrie

Those who love Brian De Palma's adaptation of the Stephen King novel Carrie will probably regard director Kimberly Peirce's slavish devotion to the 1976 film as pointless, but newcomers are more likely to embrace this self-aware update. The De Palma original is a minor classic that overshadows this nearly scene-for-scene reproduction, although for anyone arriving to the new Carrie without baggage, the mostly intact story is still queasily irresistible. There are significant departures here, some of them disappointing compromises, while others show that Peirce and her collaborators have larger goals beyond updating Stephen King's story for the online-bullying generation. This would have worked if the actress playing Carrie was anything more than adequate, but Chloë Grace Moretz is overly mannered and false. That same artificiality permeates the proceedings—everyone here looks too pretty, everything feels too polished, and every theme is too obvious and strident.