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Maleficent (2014)

“Maleficent” is a film that, against all odds, manages to be both a visual masterpiece and a decent retelling of a story we all thought we knew.

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Maleficent ScreenDim Review

“Maleficent,” the film that dared to drag one of Disney’s most deliciously evil villains into the harsh light of protagonist glory, surprisingly doesn’t completely face-plant. Instead, it offers a twisted fairy tale that’s as visually stunning as it is begrudgingly engaging, despite its earnest attempts to soften a villain who was perfectly fine being terrifying.

Angelina Jolie, with cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass and a smirk that could freeze hell over, absolutely owns the role of Maleficent. She brings a depth to the character that the script barely deserves, turning a simple tale of revenge into a complex story of betrayal, heartache, and the kind of redemption arc you’d usually roll your eyes at—if anyone else were leading the charge. Jolie’s performance is so magnetic that it almost, almost makes you forget the film’s occasional lapses into saccharine territory.

The plot is as predictably Disney as getting a song stuck in your head: a young, innocent girl (Elle Fanning’s Aurora) is cursed by a not-so-wicked witch with a heart of not-quite-stone. The twist? The witch starts feeling maternal. Yes, the film takes our fearsome Maleficent and gives her a backstory that justifies her malevolence with a broken heart. Because heaven forbid a woman just wants to be evil without a sob story, right?

Yet, under the direction of Robert Stromberg, “Maleficent” shines when it least tries to adhere to the traditional fairytale narrative. Stromberg, wielding CGI like a kid in a virtual candy store, crafts a world so lush and vibrant that it feels like stepping into a dream. Or a high-budget video game. The creatures of the moors, from tiny flower pixies to massive tree warriors, are rendered with such loving detail that you can’t help but wish they had more screen time as opposed to the humans.

Supporting Jolie is a cast that does what they can with what they’re given. Fanning, as Aurora, is all wide-eyed innocence and benevolence, bringing a much-needed lightness to the shadowy moor that Maleficent calls home. Sharlto Copley, playing King Stefan, tackles his role with a scenery-chewing gusto that borders on the maniacal, serving as a stark reminder that no one does unhinged quite like he does.

The real scene-stealer, however, is the visuals. The cinematography is a feast for the eyes, with each shot framed to perfection, showcasing the fantastical world in all its glory. From the dark depths of Maleficent’s haunted forest to the sunlit beauty of the human kingdom, the film ensures that if you’re not entirely sold on the story, you’ll at least be busy gawking at the scenery.

Despite its flaws—like a script that sometimes reads like a motivational poster for misunderstood villains—“Maleficent” is undeniably entertaining. It takes a well-known story, adds a few twists, and spins it into something that, while not entirely new, is refreshingly different from the typical fairy tale fare. The music, composed by James Newton Howard, carries the emotional heft that the screenplay occasionally lacks, weaving a sonic tapestry that complements the film’s grandeur.

“Maleficent” is a film that, against all odds, manages to be both a visual masterpiece and a decent retelling of a story we all thought we knew. It takes a character who was once the epitome of unadulterated evil and turns her into something more nuanced, more complex, and, dare I say, likeable. It’s the sort of film that, despite your better judgment and your initial resistance, charms you into submission. So go ahead, give it a watch—just don’t blame me if you end up siding with the dark fairy over the sunny princess. It’s that kind of movie.

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Films

Sinners (2025)

It’s fine, I suppose, but I don’t understand why everyone’s acting like it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread when it’s really more like adequately buttered toast.

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Sinners (2025)

Sinners is a perfectly adequate film – but that’s it, adequate.

It’s not completely shit. The acting is perfectly fine – nobody embarrasses themselves, nobody phones it in. Michael B. Jordan does his thing, everyone else does their thing, and things generally get done adequately. The music is surprisingly decent too, which is more than you can say for most films these days, where the soundtrack sounds like it was composed by someone having a nervous breakdown in a synthesiser shop.

But bloody hell, this thing is about 30 minutes too long. Maybe more. It’s like watching someone tell a perfectly good joke and then spend another half hour explaining why it was funny, complete with PowerPoint slides and audience participation segments.

You can feel where a decent 90-minute film is trying to escape from the bloated 2-hour monster it’s been trapped inside. The first 45 minutes is all set-up. Every scene goes on just a bit too long, every conversation includes about three more exchanges than necessary, and by the end you’re checking your watch wondering if time has actually stopped moving.

But there were three things in particular that bugged me about this film.

First up, we’ve got the classic “one person does something monumentally stupid that puts everyone at risk” scenario. In this case, someone invites the vampires in, because apparently nobody in this film has ever seen a vampire movie before. It’s like watching someone stick their hand in a blender and then acting surprised when it doesn’t end well.

Then there’s the antagonist, who spends precious time delivering what amounts to a TED talk about his evil plans instead of just getting on with the evil bit. Look mate, we get it, you’re the bad guy, you’ve got motivations and backstory and probably daddy issues. Just get on with the murdering, yeah? The monologuing thing stopped being clever sometime around the first Austin Powers film.

But here’s the really mental bit – even without all the villainous chat, the plan still makes no bloody sense. He’s going to burn anyway? What was the strategy there exactly? Stand around explaining things until sunrise? It’s like watching someone play chess by explaining their moves to their opponent for twenty minutes before actually making them.

The whole thing follows the “everyone gets laid and dies” formula with the reliability of a Swiss watch. You can practically tick them off: character development, bit of romance, sexy times, immediate death. It’s so predictable you could set your calendar by it.

The setting and costumes are fine enough – period pieces generally look good because someone’s put effort into making sure the buttons are historically accurate and the dirt is appropriately distributed. But looking nice isn’t the same as being interesting, which seems to be something this film hasn’t quite grasped.

What’s most frustrating is that there’s clearly a decent film buried somewhere in this overstretched mess. Strip away the padding, tighten up the pacing, maybe don’t have your villain explain his entire life story before getting down to business, and you might have something actually worth watching.

Instead, we get a film that’s been hyped to the bloody moon by people who seem to think “adequate” is the new “brilliant.” Everyone’s acting like this is some kind of game-changing masterpiece, when it’s really just a perfectly serviceable vampire film that’s been inflated like a balloon at a children’s party.

The hype is the real problem here. When everyone’s telling you something is revolutionary cinema, you go in expecting your socks to be knocked clean off. Instead, your socks remain firmly in place, possibly even more securely attached than when you started.

Look, if you go in with properly managed expectations – thinking you’re going to see a decent enough vampire film with good production values and competent performances – you’ll probably have a perfectly acceptable time. If you go in expecting the sort of groundbreaking cinema everyone’s been promising, you’re going to come out wondering what all the fuss was about.

It’s fine, I suppose, but I don’t understand why everyone’s acting like it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread when it’s really more like adequately buttered toast.

Sinners (2025)
3.5 ScreenDim Score

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Bring Her Back (2025)

“Bring Her Back” is like a horror film that’s been assembled from really good individual scenes without anyone checking whether they actually fit together into a coherent whole.

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Bring Her Back

This horror film has more unexplained mysteries than a David Lynch fever dream, but at least the gore is properly mental.

SPOILER WARNING: Loads of spoilers here.

Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t complete shite. The gore is properly brutal, the kind that makes you wince and immediately check that all your limbs are still attached. The performances are genuinely solid across the board. And Laura, the main antagonist, is the sort of character you absolutely love to hate, like a particularly effective parking warden or someone who talks loudly on their phone in quiet train carriages.

But Christ alive, the story makes about as much sense as a chocolate teapot in a sauna.

Laura apparently kidnaps Oliver from his bedroom, according to a missing poster. Now, I’m no expert on child abduction, but last time I checked, scaling buildings and making off with random children isn’t exactly a beginner-level criminal activity. Did she just happen to have a ladder handy? Cat burglar training? A very understanding Uber driver? The film doesn’t bother explaining how someone manages to nick a kid from what we can assume is a family home without anyone noticing.

And speaking of Oliver – or Connor, or whatever his name is this week – how exactly did he get possessed in the first place? Did the demon put in an application? Was there an interview process? A background check? The film treats demonic possession like it’s as common as catching a cold, but never bothers explaining how any of this supernatural bollocks actually works.

Then there’s the question of whether Laura actually murdered Andy and Piper’s dad, or if that was just convenient manipulation. Because if she did kill him, that raises a whole other set of questions about her murder methodology. If she didn’t, then what are the odds she’d randomly acquire a kid who happens to be both female and partially blind? That’s not luck, that’s winning the evil plot lottery.

And where the hell are all the mothers? Andy’s mother – no idea what happened to her. Piper’s mum – no idea what happened to her. We find out Andy’s dad is a bit of a dick so are we meant to assume he was abusive to both mothers and they both leave without the kids? What the hell happened there?

The more you think about the logistics of what’s supposed to have happened, the more your brain starts to hurt. It’s like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces are missing and the other half are from a completely different box.

But here’s the thing – when the film stops trying to make sense and just gets on with being properly horrific, it actually works quite well. The knife scene is absolutely brutal, the kind of thing that makes you grateful you’re watching it on a screen rather than having to clean up afterwards. The table eating scene is similarly mental – properly disturbing in all the right ways.

And the actors – fair play to them – they sell the hell out of this confused narrative. They’re committed to making this mess feel real, even when the plot is doing backflips to avoid explaining itself. Laura, in particular, is brilliantly hateable. She’s the sort of antagonist who makes you genuinely invested in seeing her get her comeuppance, which is no small achievement when you’re working with material that’s held together with narrative duct tape.

“Bring Her Back” is like a horror film that’s been assembled from really good individual scenes without anyone checking whether they actually fit together into a coherent whole. It’s got all the right ingredients – decent acting, proper gore, genuinely creepy moments – but it’s been mixed together by someone who’s apparently never heard of things like “logic” or “cause and effect.”

Review 0
4 ScreenDim Score

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Smile 2 (2024)

Still better than most horror sequels, mind you. But that’s like being the tallest person in a room full of sitting people – technically accurate, but not exactly a ringing endorsement.

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Smile 2

Yes, I’m late to the party on this one.

The story follows a pop star who gets infected by the smile curse, which sounds like it should be a tabloid headline but is apparently a legitimate supernatural threat. Naomi Scott does a perfectly decent job as someone slowly losing her mind to demonic grinning, and to be fair, she sells the hell out of the increasingly unhinged behaviour. The supporting cast all do their jobs competently enough – nobody embarrasses themselves, nobody phones it in.

But here’s where it all goes tits up: the film spends most of its runtime building up tension, creating genuinely unsettling scenarios, and making you invested in what’s happening to these characters. Then, just when you think you’re getting somewhere, it pulls the old “actually, the last thirty minutes were all in her head because demons” trick.

It’s the horror equivalent of those dreams where you think you’ve woken up but you’re still dreaming, except instead of being clever, it’s just bloody annoying. You know what’s not scary? Being told that the scary thing you just watched wasn’t real. You know what doesn’t create tension? Undermining your own narrative with the supernatural equivalent of “it was all a dream.”

This isn’t innovative storytelling; it’s lazy writing disguised as psychological complexity. It’s what happens when writers can’t figure out how to resolve their plot properly so they just declare that half of it didn’t actually happen. It’s like playing chess with someone who keeps moving the pieces and then claiming the rules were different all along.

The gore is adequate enough – nothing that’ll make you lose your lunch, but sufficient to remind you that you’re watching a horror film and not an episode of “Holby City” with occasional grinning. There are some properly unsettling moments scattered throughout, particularly a sequence where smiling people materialise in the protagonist’s flat and only move when she’s not looking directly at them. It’s properly creepy, like having the world’s most sinister game of Red Light, Green Light happening in your living room.

That bit actually works brilliantly – it’s the kind of nightmare logic that makes you genuinely uncomfortable without resorting to cheap jump scares or explaining itself to death. More of that, please, and less of the “surprise, none of this mattered” bollocks.

But then we need to talk about the product placement, because bloody hell, someone at Voss Water must have pictures of the filmmakers doing something embarrassing. I counted the distinctive bottles appearing on screen at least eight times, which is approximately seven more times than necessary to establish that people in this film drink water. It’s so blatant it becomes genuinely distracting – you start watching for the next Voss bottle appearance instead of paying attention to the actual horror.

It’s like they’ve confused a horror film with a particularly expensive advert for overpriced bottled water. Every time someone needs to hydrate, out comes another perfectly positioned Voss bottle, gleaming in the light like some kind of Norwegian beacon of commercial desperation. You half expect the demon to start grinning because it’s just remembered to stay properly hydrated.

I understand that films need financing, and product placement is part of modern cinema. But there’s a difference between subtle brand integration and basically turning your horror film into a pop-up shop for premium water. When your supernatural thriller starts feeling like a lifestyle magazine, you’ve probably gone too far.

If you enjoyed the first “Smile,” you’ll probably find this tolerable enough. If you were hoping for something that built meaningfully on the original concept rather than just repeating it with better production values and more water bottle cameos, you might come away feeling like you’ve been sold a slightly more expensive version of something you already owned.

Still better than most horror sequels, mind you. But that’s like being the tallest person in a room full of sitting people – technically accurate, but not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Smile 2 (2024)
3.5 ScreenDim Score

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