Christina's world: the dark, sardonic 10-year-old who debuted in Mermaids is now a dark, sardonic 26-year-old--and still a Hollywood oddity. But with her searing turn in Black Snake Moan, Christina Ricci puts lightweight starlets to shame.(Profile)(Biography)

W, September, 2006 by West, Kevin

At the Sundance Film Festival last year, a young director named Craig Brewer was suddenly the biggest new thing in a business built on overnight sensations. His feature Hustle & Flow--a little movie about a small-time pimp and a scrawny geek who burst through the Memphis music scene with their homemade hits--wowed the snowbound crowd and, more important, sold to Paramount for $9 million. That sale instantly made Brewer's next script, for something called Black Snake Moan, the kind of smoking-hot property that gets read on the studio jets back to Hollywood. No matter that Black Snake Moan was a Southern fable about a Godfearing former bluesman, Lazarus, who chains a trashy nymphomaniac, Rae, to his radiator and tries to cure her of what the town's leering menfolk call...