On December 16, join us for a special screening of Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring.

In 2008, a group of privileged L.A. teenagers invaded and burglarized the homes of several Hollywood celebrities including Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, until their bragging and boasting about what was reported to be over $3 million in thefts landed them in prison and, in some cases, on reality TV.

Adapting Nancy Jo Sales' Vanity Fair article about the case, Coppola tartly dramatizes the detrimental influence of celebrity culture on the not-so-common people who reside so close to yet so far from its epicentre.

Much as she did in Marie Antoinette, Coppola fixates on the "bling" that her characters covet, but with the period-piece trappings removed the director's satirical thrust is all the more clear: in a world that has made itself incessantly superficial, materialistic, and morally bankrupt, the fetish value of an object has become almost completely divorced from the hefty human cost of obtaining it.