Spring Break Forever

Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers takes four young women—two of them former Disney products, scrubbed clean by years of wholesome branding—and drops them into a neon Florida underworld anchored by James Franco’s gold-toothed, cornrowed dealer Alien, who is the best and strangest thing Franco has ever done on camera. The film isn’t really about debauchery or girls gone wrong. It’s about wanting—what happens when you want more, and then more than that, and the wanting itself becomes the only destination. Franco’s repeated incantation, spring break forever, lands somewhere between a threat and a prayer, and the film is good enough to hold both at once.