BRIAN VINER reviews Matilda The Musical 

Matilda The Musical (PG, 117 mins)

Rating: *****

Verdict: An exuberant joy

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (12A, 139 mins)

Rating: ***

Verdict: calculated pleasure

In case you’re already looking to postpone the ubiquitous coverage of the World Cup, let me start by apologizing for a football analogy.

When the streaming giant Netflix shelled out an eye-popping $500 million for Roald Dahl’s back catalog last year, many thought it overpaid. But Matilda The Musical is like an expensive striker in fantastic shape; suddenly the investment seems like a smart move.

This film is an exuberant delight from start to finish, superbly written, acted and choreographed, and could delight even the notoriously dyspeptic Dahl himself.

It’s an adaptation of the landmark West End and Broadway hit, but that’s not always a recipe for success on screen. Plus, director Matthew Warchus is the man who reworked Dahl’s novel for the stage in the first place, and the words, music, and lyrics are by original writers Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin, so the venture could easily have had a limiting theatrical feel . .

Instead, Warchus uses the camera to give a whole new energy to the story, about a prodigy girl who uses telekinetic powers to outsmart an evil headmaster. It works gloriously on screen.

Helpful all the kids are great and little Alisha Weir, the Irish newcomer in the title role, is a real find. She is amazing and looks just right too.

Matilda shouldn’t be too charming. For all her goodness, she has a real devilish streak. Young Alisha captures that perfectly. Imagine being only 11 years old and not remotely outdone by Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough, both an absolute hoot as Matilda’s terrible parents, or even by the great lady herself, Emma Thompson.

With broken veins, discolored teeth, a hairy chin, plank-like bosom and huge black top boots, Thompson plays the monstrous head, Agatha Trunchbull, as a sort of (vaguely) female Benito Mussolini, parading through her empire striking fear into the hearts of everyone – except Matilda – who dares to meet her terrible look.

It’s a scene-stealing gift of a role (played in the non-musical 1996 film version by Pam Ferris) and is rumored to have been offered first to Ralph Fiennes. But Thompson, who becomes Miss Trunchbull, England’s 1959 hammer throw champion, seizes the opportunity and throws him out of the park.

The role of Miss Honey, the loving, sympathetic teacher who persuades Matilda’s horrible parents to let her go to school, is in some ways a more difficult character to portray convincingly, but Lashana Lynch does a great job.

Picking a favorite song or favorite scene is a pain; they are all so witty, so pleasing to the ear and the eye, with the occasional echo of another wonderful movie musical, Carol Reed’s Oliver! (1968).

But if I had to choose, it would be Miss Trunchbull’s demonic spelling test, followed by her crypto-fascist anthem, The Smell Of Rebellion.

Cheers to all involved, but perhaps especially to Roald Dahl, who in coming up with all this gave other incredibly creative people the chance to build on his mighty legacy.

The amazingly creative mind in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery seems to belong to a tech billionaire named Miles Bron (Edward Norton), who is seemingly on the verge of solving the planet’s energy crisis.

He’s so ridiculously rich that he hired the Mona Lisa to bail out the pandemic-ravaged French government. But is he really the smart clog he claims to be?

The task of finding out and solving the twisted whodunnit that arises when people drop dead falls to the world’s greatest detective, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), whom we first met three years ago in Knives Out. Honestly, I preferred the first movie; it had a playful charm, while this one seems a bit calculated, with a plot, even with explanatory flashbacks, too wildly labyrinthine for its own good.

Yet Craig is great again, still hammering the Louisiana accent so it sounds like a mint julep in vocal form. It comes as no great surprise this time around to learn that Blanc is gay (watch out for the fleeting star cameo his boyfriend reveals), with no romantic interest in his sidekick, Bron’s former business partner, played by Janelle Monae.

Otherwise, nothing is as it seems in Bron’s Greek island lair, topped by an onion-shaped crystal palace. He designed it as a tribute to a bar where he met the friends who are now his slave, and his pocket.

Among them are fashionista Birdie (Kate Hudson), politician Claire (Kathryn Hahn) and social media star Duke (Dave Bautista), all summoned to the island to play a diabolical murder mystery game devised by Bron himself. help, he admits, from Gone Girl writer Gillian Flynn.

The script is laced with pop culture references like that, which makes it a lot of fun, if you sometimes get the unhelpful suspicion that writer-director Rian Johnson and his cast might be having 25 percent more fun than their audience.

Matilda is in cinemas from today. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is in cinemas until next Wednesday, then on Netflix from December 23.

How two hard-nosed reporters sparked the MeToo uprising

She Said (15, 129 mins)

Rating: **

Verdict: too worthy for half

The 2015 film Spotlight, which details the Boston Globe’s exposure of systematic child sexual abuse by Catholic priests, was rightfully named Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

She Said is trying to do the same for the New York Times investigation that led to the demise of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and sparked the MeToo movement. But it won’t get any Oscars.

It’s not that it’s a bad movie. It is very well acted. But it’s too dramatically inert, too self-consciously worthy to count as a thriller, unlike Spotlight and that other great “newspaper procedural,” All The President’s Men (1976).

Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan play the two persistent Times reporters, Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, who tracked down the actresses and other women abused by Weinstein and persuaded them to tell their stories. The film, by the German director Maria Schrader with a screenplay by the British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, is based on the book they wrote, also called She Said.

I can’t speak for the book, but one of the problems with the film is that in ennobling investigative journalism in general, and Twohey and Kantor in particular, it dilutes its unique selling point. I got the feeling that our modern Woodward and Bernstein could have delved into baseball corruption, or just about anything, because what seems to matter most about the story is their brave persistence, and even how they coped with childcare issues. overcome (Kantor) and postpartum depression (Twohey) to address it.

It’s a shame because it’s still a story worth telling. But it could be that MeToo fatigue is setting in, as She Said has already bombed spectacularly at the US box office.

Fine young cannibals

Those who were still there at the end of Bones And All (18, 130 min, ****), which I saw at this year’s Venice Film Festival, enthusiastically applauded it. But there were more than a few walkouts, so be warned: it’s going to be decidedly gruesome.

Really, it’s a vampire movie with a difference, the difference is that the vampires here are cannibals, determined to feast on human flesh. It’s also a road movie, but not one that Bob Hope and Bing Crosby would have recognised.

The setting is Reagan-era America, where Maren (Taylor Russell), while searching for her long-lost mother, hooks up and falls in love with Lee (Timothee Chalamet). Together they embark on a crime spree, as a hungry Bonnie and Clyde. They’re both “eaters” though there’s an unwritten rule passed down by a creepy old man beautifully played by Mark Rylance: “Never eat, never an eater.”

Aided by wonderful acting (even in small supporting roles from the likes of Chloe Sevigny and Michael Stuhlbarg), director Luca Guadagnino somehow makes an unlikely story feel thrillingly real. It’s a hugely compelling film, compellingly creepy, but emphatically not what you’d call family fun.

Neither is Strange World (PG, 102 mins, **), although that’s exactly what it’s trying to be. It’s a Disney animation that tries so desperately to tick off so many “messages” — about the environment, teenage sexuality, the responsibilities of fatherhood, and much more — that it ends up, if not an absolute mess, then only vaguely coherent.

But at least those expert animators make sure it looks good as three generations of the Clade family (voiced by Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal and Jaboukie Young-White) fly through a strange land of flying jellyfish and more , in a quest to save their way of life.