The Lovely Bones (2009)

I’ve not read the wildly popular book “The Lovely Bones.” So I entered this Peter Jackson adaptation aware only of the plot: 14-year-old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) is murdered in 1973 by a neighbor (Stanley Tucci) and watches from her own fantastical mini-heaven as her family (parented by Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz) grieves. Oscar winner? Not. The problems come quick: Jackson references “The Lord of the Rings” in a bookstore ad, and it’s just one hint of a director obsessed with his own past. To wit: In Susie’s heaven, we are served a “Heavenly Creatures” redux, but cloying and over-stuffed with CGI dancing penguins. The fantasy puff overwhelms the drama. In heavy makeup, Tucci is the most generic child murderer I’ve ever seen on screen: Bad blond comb over. Giant "I kill" eye glasses. Loner. Openly glares as teenage girls pass by. He builds doll houses. Doll houses! The guy would flag crazy in 1973, 2003 or 1773. Worse, his denouncement is bizarrely supernatural, tasked by Susie’s spirit? God? Only the performances gel, with Ronan proving “Atonement” was no fluke. Weisz shines, always. Tucci menaces, but all in one key. Only Wahlberg falls short. Surely the book must be better than this. C+

Heavenly Creatures (1994)

“Heavenly Creatures” is a cinematic gift from God. OK, skip that, Satan. In this 1994 true-life drama, director Peter Jackson introduces Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey as two awkward, lonely teenagers who meet in early 1950s New Zealand and become the best of friends. Too close, that is.

The girls have ripe imaginations and create their own Tolkien-like world of fantasy, kings and queens, and ribald wild sex, and that world spills out of their mind into reality. The twisted result: The girls commit matricide with a brick, wrapped in a stocking.

The film is a fascinating biographical tale of these 1950s teens in a 1950s (false) sweet world, and it’s also a hellish ride inside their obviously mentally warped minds. The screenplay uses actual words from the diary of one of the girls, an outcast at school who is statutory raped by a tenant of her parents.

Winslet and Lewinsky spin gold with their parts, heart-breaking and horrifying, they show absolute happy delirium and the most savage violence, all exploded by raging hormones indignation of having no control over their lives. Jackson proved himself a genius here. A