This is the first article I ever read on Heavenly Creatures, a film which had a strong impact on my life to say the least. I did not include the picture because I am obsessed with it (although I am - to a certain extent! I'm not that weird), but because it came with the article, which I translated for you through nights and nights of hard work :)
The article was written by Diastème and published by the French edition of Première in its July 1996 issue (232). You can email him with your comments at diasteme@premiere.fr (even though he originally wrote the article in French, I know he speaks English).
The comment below the picture was also translated by yours truly :)

Winslet and Lynskey are playing tag.

Blood sisters. The young Pauline Parker is going with the flow of her undisturbed adolescence in a small village from New Zealand in the early fifties. Until Juliet Hulme - a vivid and charismatic student who won't be long before she fascinates Pauline - arrives from her native Britain. As months go by the two girls bond into a hermetic friendship, creating their own parallel universe and building a relationship both intense and threatening to all the grown-ups around. So much so that, when threatened to be separated, they won't hesitate before using a terrifying means to make sure not.

A story like any adolescent would dream of. Only without making the dream come true... Or more accurately, nightmare: the story of two young girls who would do anything to stay together, including committing what is undoubtly the most atrocious crime of all. A story before which justice and men shall proclaim their helplessness while sentencing its two protagonists to the only penalty that will ever touch them: that they shall never meet again, for as long as they live - and forever after, if they could. A story as horrifying as it is true.

We knew of Peter Jackson's irresistible bad taste through his first three features Bad Taste, Meet The Feebles, and Braindead. The surprise was all the greatest to see him gett himself started on such a serious subject, in every way. If one can understand that this story - which made quite a row in the New Zealand of the fifties - might have interested any filmmaker, in order to direct it were needed a kind of finesse and inspiration which we wouldn't have granted at first sight to the man who excelled so at bringing back the dead-alive and making the latex monsters crackle. In that Peter Jackson not only gave life -with originality - to the poetically terrifying imaginary of the young girls, filled with animated castles and living sculptures; he also designed his film like a thriller whose issue is all the stronger as it seems to be announced (note that the final scene is a little wonder of horror and editing), while meeting the challenge of penetrating the very souls of his two heroins.

Those who didn't see her in Sense and Sensibility will thus discover the young and whirling Kate Winslet in her first major movie role and starring as Pauline a newcomer called Melanie Lynskey, chosen for her likeness with the character she plays and whose coldness both in acting and pretty little face shall make the viewers' hair stand on end for a long time.

Following last year's Once were Warriors, these Heavenly Creatures seem to remind us that if there is a country today where cinema is making a scene and where films are stunning and powerful, it is New Zealand - in the antipodes, so to speak.