The Bling Ring is Sofia Coppola’s stylish and relevant look at how the idolatry of celebrity begat a special breed of brat, whose belief that to live like the kings and queens of materialism is to steal from their palaces.

With every passing generation the line between what is material and what is moral has evaporated. Once there was a church that warned against the embracement of greed, vanity and sloth. Now those who are supposed to fill empty pews worship at a different altar where Oprah is Pope, the Kardashain’s and Hilton’s the high priests, an iPhone is the new pocket bible, and Facebook where worshippers congregate to show off their spoils.

It is no wonder that a collective like “The Bling Ring” were able to sprout and fester. Made up of severally morally twisted teens  Rebecca (Katie Chang), Marc (Israel Broussard), Nicki (Emma Watson), Chloe (Claire Julien), and Sam (Tarissa Farmiga) there claim to fame was the high profile robberies of the very same celebrities and socialites (Paris Hilton, Megan Fox and Miranda Kerr) which they idolise.

Comical is the ease that they achieve the theft of these “beautiful, gorgeous things” which totalled in the millions (yet were left prime for the taking with security supposedly an indulgence not worth investing in), and intense is the depiction of these acts through director Sofia Coppola’s voyeuristic eye, with the nerve racking callousness of these thieving teens making us the viewer sweat bullets for them.

Of all Copolla’s works, The Bling Ring is the most immersive. The momentum is constantly moving forward, spurred on by a thumping soundtrack of current teen-hip favourites and much quicker edit cuts than we are used to in any of her pictures. Performances wise a strong cast of young talent convincingly portray this group of self-styled Robin Hoods, especially Emma Watson as the despicably vain, attention seeking wannabe socialite Nicki.

A complaint amongst critics is that Coppola does not delve into the reasons and motives that drove these teens to commit these crimes. Yet what many have missed is actually there for all to see in the absences of any adult guidance – be it moral or disciplinary – leading to the wrong role models preaching these children the wrong ethics.

The closest thing to parenting comes in the form of Nicki’s mother Laurie (Leslie Mann), who home school’s her children the philosophies of “The Secret”, new-age self-help bunkum popularly endorsed by Oprah Winfrey that preaches if you want something, you have to take it. When Nicki proclaims to her friends “I wanna rob!” should we be at all surprised?