Beautiful Creatures

A new teenage heroine is coming... and she's a witch!

Everyone is saying that Beautiful Creatures will be the next Twilight. The ingredients are there: a successful series of novels, a teenage romance between a mortal and a supernatural being, and a modernist house in the forest. What could go wrong?

High-school student Ethan is desesperate to escape the small town in South Carolina where he has lived all his life. When a new girl, lena, 15, arrives in the town and joins his school, he is instantly attracted to her and the fact that she is different to all the other girls he knows. What he doesn't realise is that Lena is a Caster, one of a race of magical beings who, when they turn 16, become powerful withches for either good or evil. If she turns evil, the world will be in danger.

Given her future career path and general immortality, it's not clear why lena has to go to school. but she does. And Ethan falls in love with her, even though she keeps warning him that she may soon became a demonic agent of global destruction. Some guys just can't resist a challenge when they see one.

Beautiful Creatures lacks ofiginality, but it is saved by a good sense of humour and an enjoyable performance by Emma Thompson as an evil witch in the body of a conservative Christian housewife. It probably won't be the new Tilight, however.