Maleficent

Listen well, all of you

So, this was the curse Maleficent was talking about. After all this time she finally got her revenge on Sleeping Beauty. Adding backstory to an established character is fine, but altering the events of the original tale to make Maleficent look sympathetic is not going to sit well with a lot of people, myself included. It could have been forgivable, however, if the movie had not been awkwardly balanced between uninspired action scenes and painful child-catered sequences. It’s Wicked without the genius and Disney when it wants to make a quick buck while working on better projects.

Thank goodness for Angelina Jolie, whose sleek exploration of the title character is defined by her wonderfully thorny grin and graceful dimensionality. (Not to mention her knife-sharp cheekbones, which she probably uses to open canned goods.) Jolie guides the often-stumbling script with a performance that excels when she gets to be all-out villainous, and stays strong when she becomes an unexpected parental figure to Princess Aurora (Elle Fanning), a plot twist that, for me, was hard to swallow, but irresistible when offered by Jolie.