Maleficent: Mistress Of Evil (2019) - Movie Review

2019 will likely go down as the year where Disney stretched too far, and I’m not just talking about their ever-growing monopoly on modern Western entertainment. What started out as interesting experiments to redefine their stable of animated classics (or, more likely, extend their copyright holding for said stories) has truly devolved into a collection of repeated and bewildering mistakes. Of the three that made it to cinemas this year, only one of them left me with anything positive to say, and even then, it has paled considerably since I first reviewed it.

Charming (2018) - Movie Review

Our understanding of classic fairy tales has changed substantially over the last two decades. Once the vanguards of the popular contemporary takes of Happily Ever After, studios like Disney and Dreamworks have been taking a long, hard look at the olden tales and applying the thematic scalpel. From Shrek to Frozen to the slew of live-action remakes Disney has been churning out, and will continue to do so for quite a while yet, revisionist fairy tales have provided a lot of food for thought about how much perceptions have changed. Of course, with that trend comes the unavoidable cash-ins, those who see dollar signs in the act of revising and retelling these old stories but never manage to figure out why these revisions are happening. Charming, in all ways possible, fits that mould.