Spring Breakers (2013)

Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers arrives as a beach noir assembled from montage, neon, and the repeated drone of a Britney Spears ballad. The plot, such as it is, concerns four college students who fund a Florida trip by robbing a restaurant with squirt guns and hammers, then fall in with Alien, a rapper and arms dealer played by James Franco at his most committed. Korine has said he wanted sensation over message, and the film honors that ambition. Narrative takes a back seat. Mood drives everything.

The casting reflects tabloid appetite more than any diversity mandate: four conventionally attractive white leads, with Gucci Mane supplying a memorable Black presence as the rival dealer Big Arch. Race is not a concern here, and neither is queerness, though a brief kiss over Alien's corpse gestures at something without committing to it. The film does interrogate appetite itself, obliquely. Alien's boastful American Dream of drug money, guns, and a Lamborghini gets held up for ridicule through excess and irony. The critique lands, but softly, since Korine prefers the dreamlike trance to the sermon.

Critics still argue over whether this is empowerment or exploitation. The girls arm themselves in pink ski masks and dispatch an entire gang, which reads as agency. The camera, meanwhile, glides over their bodies like a tongue, which reads as something else entirely. Both interpretations survive the runtime, and neither is settled by the closing shot of two silent young women driving home in a stolen Lamborghini. It is a strange, hypnotic artifact, more interested in the texture of American indulgence than in reforming it.