Her 1998 first feature The Virgin Suicides, based on Jeffrey Eugenides' novel, centred on a group of suburban sisters who preferred death to growing up.

One way or another, all her subsequent films have been concerned with adolescent experience - or with characters still adolescent at heart, such as the married tourist played by the teenage Scarlett Johansson in 2003's Lost in Translation.

Her latest, The Beguiled, breaks that pattern, but only to a point.

Unlike any of her earlier films, it's a remake, based on a novel by Thomas P. Cullinan, previously filmed in 1971 by Don Siegel as a vehicle for Clint Eastwood.

This earlier film is a strange but memorable slice of Southern Gothic - and an anomaly for its hardboiled director and star, who would reteam later the same year on Dirty Harry.

Like the original, the remake is set during the American Civil War, although the fairytale plot could be relocated to almost any place and time.

Colin Farrell plays the Eastwood role of John McBurney, a wounded Union soldier who staggers away from the battlefield to a secluded girls' school (here located, perhaps symbolically, in Virginia).

Officially designated an enemy, McBurney quickly becomes an object of fascination for the headmistress Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman), her sole remaining teacher (Kirsten Dunst), and their handful of pupils (including young Australian actress Angourie Rice).

With his knack for sweet talk, he does his best to take advantage of the situation, without fully registering the force of the passions he has unleashed.

On balance this is Coppola's weakest film, but it undeniably finds her trying some new things.

It's a "straight" period piece, with none of the jokey anachronisms of her 2006 Marie Antoinette.

While she has always been something of a minimalist, her lyricism here is more subdued than ever before: candlelit interiors give the impression of perceiving events through a veil, while her usual mixtape soundtrack is replaced by chirping crickets and distant cannon fire.

By Coppola's standards, both violence and adult sexuality are significantly more visible than usual – yet this is a far more romantic interpretation of the material than Siegel's.