Alison Foreman wasn\u2019t fully sold<\/a> on its ripeness:<\/p>\n\u201cIn her mesmerizing feature debut, \u2018Forbidden Fruits,\u2019 director Meredith Alloway reaches for the candy-coated cruelty of late-\u201990s cult classics \u2014 think \u2018The Craft,\u2019 \u2018Clueless,\u2019 and \u2018Jawbreaker\u2019 \u2014 only to draw back an intermittently delightful mess that never quite figures out which kind of witch movie it wants to be.<\/p>\n
Set inside a suspiciously anachronistic Dallas-area shopping mall, this recent SXSW premiere follows a quartet of young women working and worshipping at Free Eden. The boutique looks reverse-engineered from a discarded Free People mood board and bears all the hallmarks of a bygone Instagram era. There\u2019s Apple (Lili Reinhart), the poised but unpredictable queen bee; Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), a sexed-up cartoon with the bandwidth of a bobbypin; Fig (Alexandra Shipp), the vaguely \u201cscientific\u201d smart girl, who doubles as a wild card; and Pumpkin (Lola Tung), a wide-eyed newcomer who gets plucked from the store\u2019s neighboring pretzel stand and pulled into the titular clique\u2019s dreamlike orbit.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Together, the Fruits form a coven \u2014 or, at least, something like a coven \u2014 wielding their soft supernatural powers between shifts, on and off the sales floor. The film is ostensibly aiming for biting satire in the post-#girlboss era, but its foundation already feels out of step with reality in early 2026. Co-written by Alloway and Lily Houghton (adapting Houghton\u2019s 2019 play), the script leans heavily on a version of supposedly contemporary mall culture that never really existed; the effect isn\u2019t pop-infused escapism so much as temporal confusion. Still, there are flashes of something funnier and more self-aware in \u2018Forbidden Fruits,\u2019 as even its weakest points have enough glamor and guts to justify most genre girlies taking the journey eventually.\u201d<\/p>\n
Available to stream June 26.<\/p>\n
Other highlights:\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2013 \u201cInterview with the Vampire\u201d (6\/1)
\u2013 \u201cRaw\u201d (6\/1)
\u2013 \u201cFind Your Friends\u201d (6\/12)<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cForbidden Fruits\u201d (dir. Meredith Alloway, 2026) Image Credit: IFC Films Any movie that inspires a critic to reference…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":490403,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,397],"class_list":["post-490402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/490403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Fig](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Forbidden-Shudder.jpeg\")