Maleficent

Robert Stromberg’s 2014 film is a production designer’s first time directing, and it behaves like one. He had designed Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, and the invention here sits in the moors, the pixies and the wall of thorns while the court scenes are blocked flatly. The opening was reshot over eight days to fix first-act pacing, with John Lee Hancock assisting Stromberg on those days. One scene is the axis of everything. On 10 June 2014, on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, Angelina Jolie said that she and screenwriter Linda Woolverton were fully conscious of writing the removal of the wings as a metaphor for rape. Stefan drugs her first and then cuts them off. A parent putting this on as a bedtime fairy tale ought to know that in advance. There is also a concrete measure of how the makeup read in a room. The only child willing to act opposite Jolie in Rick Baker’s horns and cheekbone prosthetics was her own daughter Vivienne, because no other child on the set could stand near her without fear. Not for you if: you want fidelity to the 1959 cartoon. The fairies are comic incompetents, Prince Phillip’s kiss fails to work, and the dragon in the finale is the raven Diaval, transformed, rather than Maleficent herself.