Birth (2004)

Jonathan Glazer's beautifully acted and beautiful-to-look-at Birth, about an affluent Upper East Side New York family intruded upon by a boy who claims to be a reincarnated dead husband, wants to be taken seriously - and some people oblige, calling it a mystery and treatise on profound things like belief and loss, but it plays out more like a deadly earnest fairytale - that is to say, it plays out ridiculously - and while the final scene does a good job, finally, of grounding the first-world problems of these toffs in some real emotion, getting there is far too long a road - an absurd and monotonous one - with an especially icky bath scene and kiss scene along the way.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Vourdalak (French: 'La Famille du Vourdalak') (2023)

This French fantasy — at times horrible but never really horror; more ghastly, like a Grimms' fairytale — is based on a 1839 Russian novella about an aristocrat, lost in a Serbian forest, who encounters a strange family, and it's this story rather than the movie that is interesting — the monstrous patriarch predates Bram Stoker's Dracula — but the ghastly monster-like character is a weird overacting claymation or puppet, which detracts from rather than enhances your engagement with the gothic goings-on. 

★★★☆☆

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Jack the Giant Slayer (2013)

The Giant Slayer story I remember was about a false hero talking about flies, not giants, when he boasted he'd downed six, and the Beanstalk story was a fairytale involving a cow sale and just one giant with a keen sense of smell, but this movie's hybrid Beanstalk/Slayer story — too gory for kids, only mildly entertaining for adults — mixes Giant Slayer mythology with modern flourishes and features myriad giants - cartoony Fraggle Rock ogre-ones, not real people-split-camera ones, for some reason.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters 3D (2013)

Witches can be fun (see the 1990 Roald Dahl's The Witches) but in this 2013 offering, just one of a spate of recent ultraviolent fairytales too adult for kids and too childish for adults (Jack the Giant Slayer, Snow White and the Huntsman, etc), everything is second to the 3D effects including the witches, a hohum bunch about as engaging as a parade of goth enthusiasts outside your window.

★☆☆☆☆

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Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

The fairytale is given a grubby Middle Ages look and stretched to movielength by cgi sequences and extraneous details that are boring and add nothing to the clunkily told story, but as the queen with a personality disorder, Charlize Theron is effective.

★★☆☆☆

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Maleficent (2014)

Once upon a time, enormous hit Wicked told a backstory that sympathetically explained the wickedness of its fairytale anti-heroine, and perhaps that is what Maleficent, a boring fairytale not quite aimed at children and not quite aimed at adults, hoped to do too...but doesn't....The End.

★★☆☆☆

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Arrietty (2010)

This Japanese animation is perfect entertainment for kids, especially those familiar with "The Borrowers" books upon which it is based, and adults won't mind the narrative pacing problems which make it seem the entire story (think 60s TV series "Land of the Giants" for kids) happens over about twenty minutes.

★★☆☆☆

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Hanna (2011)

A girl is raised by Eric Bana to be an assassin but ham-fisted fairytale themes dog the girl at every turn of her story, making what could have been a Euro-cool spy thriller a strange farce.

★☆☆☆☆

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