The Secret Life of Bees

Gina Prince-Bythewood's adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd's novel The Secret Life of Bees stars Dakota Fanning as Lily, a fourteen-year-old growing up in a small southern town in 1964. She is haunted by memories of shooting her mother when she was a young girl. Lily lives with her emotionally distant ...more

Once again, Dakota Fanning plays a motherless teenager living in the 1960s in the racially segregated South. And yet again, Fanning approaches her role with a savvy aplomb normally reserved for adults. While The Secret Life of Bees is more uplifting fare than Fanning's recently released Hounddog, where her motherless Southern teenager is brutalized and raped, it's as though Fanning's precious adolescence has been fast-tracked and she's leapt into adulthood. Fanning's sophisticated, ...more

A movie designed to give audiences -- specifically women -- the quintessential "good cry," The Secret Life of Bees springs from the same home-cooked, heartwarming, bittersweet, girl-power primordial ooze that produced genre classics like Fried Green Tomatoes and The Color Purple. Dakota Fanning stars as Lily Owens, a 14-year-old living in a small Southern town, who is haunted by the guilt of accidentally shooting her mother when she was a little girl. When her emotionally distant father (Paul ...more