THE LEGEND OF THE FIVE

Stars: Lauren Esposito, Gabi Sproule, Leigh Joel Scott, Nicholas Adrianakos, Deborah An, Beth Champion, Eric James Gravolin, Matthew Pritchard and Tiriel Mora.
Writer: Peter McLeod
Director: Joanne Samuel

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ½

The Breakfast Club go to Ferngully in The Legend of The Five, the new Aussie Y.A. indie romp that leans heavily on the ‘80s teen movie beats to soft-sell a contemporary and urgent environmental message. Director Joanne Samuel and writer Peter McLeod show a lot of respect for their target audience, those socially-aware, issue-driven young people who look to Greta Thunberg in the same way their parents looked to Molly Ringwald.

The core group of characters are a demographically-diverse lot, clearly designed to appeal to as many corners of a modern high-school courtyard as possible. The key protagonist is displaced American Zoe (Lauren Esposito), whose dad has chosen to move to Australia to help cope with the death of Zoe’s mom. A loner at her new school, Zoe crosses paths with perky alpha-girl Caitlin (Gabi Sproule); her jock bf, Javier (Nicholas Adrianakos); dark, arty type Kaylee (Deborah An); and, bespectacled book-worm Brit, Owen (Leigh Joel Scott).

On a school excursion to a museum, the group find themselves in possession of a mystical wooden shaft (introduced in a thrilling prologue, set in 1922 and straight out of an Indiana Jones-type spectacle), that soon hurtles them across space and time into a woodland fantasy realm. Here, an ageing wizard (the great Tiriel Mora) sets their quest in motion - the chosen five are ‘elementalists’, representative of nature’s forces, and they must seek out The Tree of Knowledge (recalling James Cameron’s own enviro-epic, Avatar) and save it from an evil sorceress (Beth Champion) before the forest, then the world, is destroyed.

Gen-Xers will have a blast spotting nods to the films of their youth that have provided inspiration for Samuel’s first directorial effort, coming 41 years after she played Max’s wife Jessie in Dr. George Miller’s iconic 1979 actioner, Mad Max. The bickering besties are cast a little older, but they could be The Goonies, or its more fantastical offshoot, Explorers (both 1985). The creatures of the make-believe world (stunningly shot amongst Sydney’s Blue Mountains by DOP Casimir Dickson) recall Ridley Scott’s Legend (1985), Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986) and, more recently, Andrew Adamson’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005).

Where Samuel and McLeod most successfully stake their claim as strong, legitimate voices for the younger generation is in a sequence that takes their characters deep into a darkness where they must confront their own negative selves. The scene highlights teenage fears, jealousies, grief and insecurities in very real terms, utilising the fantasy setting as a means by which to conquer those forces that bear heavily on young minds and emotions. 

It is a bold narrative sidestep that adds resonance to a film that might have otherwise played too simplistically for the 13+ age bracket. As it stands, The Legend of The Five is solidly-packaged, all-ages Australian entertainment with strong international prospects.

THE LEGEND OF THE FIVE will play a limited Australian theatrical season from June 25; other territories to follow.

THE WAVE

Stars: Justin Long, Donald Faison, Katia Winter, Sheila Vand, Tommy Flanagan, Bill Sage, Sarah Minnich, Monique Candelaria, Ronnie Gene Blevins and Blythe Howard.
Writer: Carl W. Lucas
Director: Gille Klabin

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★

A riff on A Christmas Carol in which Ebenezer Scrooge swallows The Red Pill is a good starting point for those readying to partake of Gille Klabin’s trippy, challenging, wholly satisfying freak-out, The Wave. The debut feature for the music vid/short film director utilises skills honed over a decade in that visually exciting sector in its representation of one morally wayward man’s descent into a drug-fuelled world of paranoia, psychedelica, time-tripping and life lessons.

With always engaging leading man Justin Long (pictured, above; with co-star Donald Faison) ensuring audiences stay connected despite some often out-there narrative developments, The Wave will play as well with those that dig anxiety-inducing adventures like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours as it will with those still under the influence of whatever helped them just enjoy nine hours of nightclubbing.

Long plays Frank, an insurance lawyer introduced salivating over the career opportunity that denying benefits to the family of a dead fireman will bring. Too long in the professional trenches and with a cash-strapped domestic life teetering on the abyss of banality, Frank decides to connect with his partying workmate Jeff (Donald Faison) for some midweek bar-hopping. The pair are soon doing shots with cool twenty-somethings Natalie (Katia Winter) and Theresa (Sheila Vand; pictured, below), who convince them the night is young (it isn’t) and a party with harder narcotics ought to be their first destination (it oughtn’t).

To impress Theresa and share in some tongue-led dual drug taking, Frank allows himself to be led astray by charismatic dealer Aeolus (a terrific Tommy Flanagan). Much to Frank’s increasing panic, the chemical indulgence leads to a lost wallet, an angry wife, hours of blacked-out time, a nightmarish psychotic episode during a boardroom presentation and, most troublingly, instantaneous jumps in time and place. The misadventures lead to a life-threatening few hours in the company of unhinged lowlife Ritchie (Ronnie Gene Blevins), until Frank comes to terms with his newly-acquired superpower and sets about making right the insanity of his life, past and present.

With Carl W Lucas’ script wisely building character and tension before transitioning into its clever, more fantastical genre twists, Long and Klabin craft an everyman’s journey through an otherworldly landscape that is both familiar but off-kilter enough to intrigue and ultimately amaze. It is to the actor’s credit that Frank is more than just the scumbag attorney/unfaithful spouse the first act of the film allows him to be. Klabin’s faith in Long’s empathic qualities (underused by Hollywood in leading parts, for some reason) pays off when the narrative niftily reveals its ace-in-the-hole. As the hedonistic bud who leads Frank astray, Faison is funny and suitably incredulous when the laws of physics are restructured in front of him; as Theresa, the girl for whom Frank is willing to alter his life’s trajectory after a few minutes in her company, the lovely Vand is well cast.

The transition from real world stability into time-leaping psychosis is made all the more convincing by the rich aural depth the production constructs. Tech contributions from sound design vet Eric Offin and mixer Carlos Garcia’s team heighten the already pretty ‘high’ visuals that Klabin and effects supervisor Eric Thelander conjure. That The Wave works with such transcendent qualities on the heart as well as the head is indicative of the great work done by all departments.

The Wave Official Trailer from Epic Pictures Group on Vimeo.

SCALES (SAYIDAT AL BAHR)

Stars: Basima Hajjar, Ashraf Barhoum, Yagoub Al Farhan, Fatima Al Taei, Haifa Al-Agha and Rida Ismail.
Director/writer: Shahad Ameen

AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE: November 21, 2020 at the Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival.

WINNER: Best Film, 30th Singapore International Film Festival’s Silver Screen Awards; November 30, 2019.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ½

Recalling Niki Caro’s Whale Rider in its melding of tribal mythologies and patriarchal defiance, Shahad Ameen’s Scales is an altogether darker fantasy work marked distinctive by its potent social relevance and chilling imagination. Set against a monochromatic dystopian landscape on the rocky foreshores of a dead sea, where the ‘sea maidens’ of lore survive on the villagers’ offerings of young girls, the Saudi director’s debut feature (a reimagining of the concept she introduced in her 2013 short, Eye & Mermaid) is fairy-tale horror of the highest order.

The sacrifice of young women (disturbingly portrayed in the film’s opening frames) is believed by the village elders to ensure bountiful fishing and enduring prosperity. When young father Muthana (Yagoub Al Farhan) defies the tradition, saving his baby daughter Hayat from the creature’s webbed claw, it is believed he brings ill fortune to his people and a lifetime of derisive shame to his child. Twelve years later, Hayat (the remarkable Basima Hajjar, 15 at the time of shooting) spends her days fending of bullies, staying clear of bitter elder Amer (Ashraf Barhoum) and trying to find a niche for herself somewhere between the responsibilities of the boys her age and the dark destiny facing the girls.

When her bitter mother Aisha (Fatima Al Taei) gives birth to a boy, her fate seems sealed; at the next full moon, she will be led to the water’s edge and given to the sea maidens. However, she survives and is re-evaluated by the men folk when she drags a creature from the deep to her village square.

There is sly humour at work surrounding the relationship between the mermaids and the men in Ameen’s otherwise steely, serious narrative. The elders fear the wrath of the women of the deep but govern ruthlessly women of their own kind. The dichotomy of this suggests their beliefs, based on age-old traditions, are confused and kind of ridiculous. In a broader context, the villager’s relationship with the ocean creatures represents how false beliefs and a society’s adherence to outdated dogma can eventually tear a community apart.

Hayat scratches at dry skin on her feet, skin that turns to scales when she gets them wet; the physical change that 12 year-old girls experience is central to Hayat’s complexity. The young woman (whose name means ‘life’ in Arabic) fights for her survival with a determination that slowly dawns on her and with the fierceness that the men fear in her underwater sisters. Like Paikea, portrayed by Oscar-nominee Keisha Castle-Hughes in Caro’s adaptation of Witi Ihimaera’s Maori fable, Hayat is a truly modern heroine of understated resilience and, quite literally, the future of her people.

As pure genre cinema, Scales lands some truly mesmerising scenes, not least of which is the terrifying moment a mermaid, dragged from the sea, crawls toward Hayat across a ship’s deck. DOP João Ribeiro proves a master of the black-&-white mood and composition, both on land and at sea; shot on the jagged, majestic coast of Oman, Scales is a gorgeous looking film. The final moments, drenched in the hope that a new and prosperous future lays ahead, are wondrous frames of film.

Representing one of the strongest feature debuts to ever emerge from the region, Shahad Ameen announces herself as that most special of filmmakers - a storyteller that can work timely subtext and scathing commentary into a great work of fantasy.

A BOY CALLED SAILBOAT

Stars: Julian Atocani Sanchez, Noel Gugliemi, Elizabeth De Razzo, Jake Busey, Keanu Wilson, Rusalia Benavidez, Zeyah Pearson, Lew Temple, Patricia Kalis and J.K. Simmons.
Writer/Director: Cameron Nugent

Rating: ★★★★

Like his eponymous ukulele-wielding protagonist, writer-director Cameron Nugent strikes the perfect chord with his feature-length debut, A Boy Called Sailboat. An understated, utterly beguiling dose of doe-eyed magic-realism, the Australian’s fanciful but sure-footed foray into one Hispanic family’s life in the U.S. south-west could not be more timely; in telling one small story, A Boy Called Sailboat also celebrates the common humanity that binds diverse communities.

Few depictions of life’s base pleasures – food, music, family and love – play out with such sweet-natured resonance as in Nugent’s narrative. The premise, like the lives led by the humans at its core, is simple; a pre-teen boy (the wonderful Julian Atocani Sanchez), blessed with both a vivid imagination and strongly-defined sense of family, stumbles on a small, discarded guitar and decides to teach himself to play, so that one day he may sing a self-penned song to his ailing ‘abuela’ (Rusalia Benavidez).

However, the lives of all around him – father José (Noel Gugliemi), mother Meyo (Elizabeth De Razzo), best friend Peeti (Keanu Wilson), school crush Mandy (Zeyah Pearson), teacher Bing (Jake Busey), a local DJ (Lew Temple) and ultimately the entire population of his New Mexico suburb – are given greater profundity when they hear Sailboat play his uke and sing his song, a composition that renders anyone who hears it emotionally reborn. In a bold and effective device, every time the boy sings Nugent’s screen goes silent but for a single chord, thereby forcing his audience to bring their own definition of what most deeply stirs their soul.

A Boy Called Sailboat has many idiosyncratic beats and skewed nuances, the kind that need a strongly-defined real-world emotional connection to work. Ten minutes in, Nugent has filled his film with so many small, strange tics (a yacht being towed in the desert; a leaning home held upright by a single beam; a meatballs-only nightly meal; a soccer-obsessed kid who holsters an eye dropper) there is the very real threat that his vision will die the death of a thousand quirks.

Thankfully, Nugent proves himself to be a master of meaningful whimsy, in much the same way as Wes Anderson (a clear inspiration, especially his 2012 triumph, Moonrise Kingdom) or early Tim Burton (circa 1990s Edward Scissorhands). All his actors are attuned to his nuanced vision, especially a cameoing J.K. Simmons (pictured, above) as used-car salesman/life-coach Ernest; in one wonderful sequence, Nugent skillfully edits a series of reveals as the Oscar-winning actor monologues some life advice to young Sailboat, while the kid stares transfixed at…a sailboat.

Talent extends behind the camera, too, not only in the form of DOP John Garrett’s skill with sparse, hot location work. The production’s collaboration with classical guitarists Leonard and Slava Grigoryan has provided a soundtrack of wistful, lovely melodies, many traditional sea-faring tunes (‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’; ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’) in line with Sailboat’s oceanic obsession. All contributors reinforce the filmmaker’s remarkably assured stewardship, resulting in surely the most impressive calling-card film in recent memory.

THE BFG

Stars: Ruby Barnhill, Mark Rylance, Rebecca Hall, Bill Hader, Jemaine Clement, Matt Frewer, Rafe Spall and Penelope Wilton.
Writer: Melissa Mathison; based upon the children’s novel by Roald Dahl.
Director: Steven Spielberg

Premiered Out of Competition at 69^th Festival du Cannes; screened at the Grand Lumiere Theatre.

Rating: 2/5

Steven Spielberg has been open about his adoration for the classic Roald Dahl children’s novel The BFG, of how the 1982 book was standard bedtime reading in his household and how an adaptation has been in development for close to 20 years. He is not alone; the book is a publishing phenomenon that impacted a generation of young readers, just as Spielberg’s body of work is arguably the most fondly favoured American film output of the last half century.

Reteaming with the late writer Melissa Mathison (E.T. The Extra-terrestrial) and long time producing partners Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, Spielberg at least delivers on his promise to get it made. Unfortunately, the only element of the entire production that inspires any kind of wonder is just how far from a satisfying adaptation the film proves to be, given the potential held by the pairing of these two great storytellers.

The heroine is Sophie (Ruby Barnhill), a little girl with big dreams who wanders the halls of her 80’s era London orphanage (looking very Harry Potter-ish, as does much of the film) well into the witching hour. Barely 10 words have been spoken in the film when we meet Oscar-winner Mark Rylance’s not-yet-friendly giant, who abducts Sophie from her bed and takes her to a faraway land. The trauma of the abduction barely registers on Sophie and soon a type of accelerated ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ kicks in. The pair chatter away interminably in the giant’s home at the expense of plot establishment, the now friendly giant instead introducing her to such wonders as The Tree of Dreams and a workshop where he mixes the tree’s pickings to create happy night time visions.

The BFG is the runt of a large band of horribly ill-tempered, one-dimensional giants (just like the ones in Bryan Singer’s dud Jack The Giant Slayer), many times larger and with a cruel hunger for human flesh. Sophie convinces The BFG to come with her to Buckingham Palace, resulting in the film’s liveliest, funniest sequence, and advise The Queen (Penelope Wilton, the film’s best asset) and her offsider Mary (an entirely ill-fitting Rebecca Hall) that the giants are a real threat and a military first strike against them is the best option. Nocturnal kidnapping, the threat of cannibalism and the upside of a tactical airborne offensive all make for a modern family movie, apparently.

The absence of any discernible narrative for a great swathe of the film may not bother the real littlies; colour and movement abound and Barnhill is cutey-pie enough to connect with the tots. On the other hand, parents (in fact, anyone over 10) will be driven to distraction by the sweetness-over-substance approach. The BFG and his clan also speak in a broken ‘pigeon English’-like dialect called ‘gobblefunk’ that is often impossible to understand, ensuring a ponderous 115 minutes of young ones pulling at your shirt sleeve and asking, “What did he say?”

Steven Spielberg has rarely ever let the technology at his disposal do the work for him. Jaws, Close Encounters of The Third Kind, Jurassic Park, A.I. and Minority Report broke new ground in almost every frame, but Spielberg steadfastly put story first.  The BFG more readily recalls his lumbering over-produced misfires 1941, Hook and Always. It also bares witness to just how fallible the director is in this late-career stage; for every great work (Munich; Lincoln; Bridge of Spies), he persists at shoehorning storylines into experiments with CGI and performance capture tech, resulting in stinkers like Kingdom of The Crystal Skull, The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse.

The occasionally pretty images captured by DOP Janusz Kaminski and omnipresent orchestral work of John Williams keep demanding that we feel for Sophie and her gargantuan friend, but Spielberg’s erratic tonality, overly-familiar technique and heavy-handed graphics renders what should have been a soaring adaptation of Dahl just plain dull.

THE MONKEY KING 2

Stars: Aaron Kwok, Gong Li, Feng Shaofeng, Kelly Chen, Xiao Shenyang and Him Law.
Writers: Ran Ping, Ran Jianan, Elvis Man and Yin Yiyi
Director: Pou-Soi Cheang

Rating: 3.5/5

The Lunar New Year festivities heralding in The Year of The Monkey will assuredly include celestial box office takings for the epic and emotional fantasy adventure, The Monkey King 2.

Featuring Aaron Kwok in a vibrant, vivid rendition of the legendary simian deity, Sun Wukong, and an giddy parade of artfully rendered special effects showpieces, Pou-Soi Cheang’s sequel to his 2014 blockbuster proves an infinitely more engaging and impressive mounting of key elements from  Wu Cheng’en’s classic novel, Journey to The West. The narrative troughs and visual overkill of the first film are nowhere to be found in the sequel; leaner and more focussed, the central characters take on greater emotional resonance and the artists crafting wondrous visions of this fantasy landscape come into their own.

Despite the title, most central to the plot is young monk Xuanzang (William Feng), an idealistic traveller who, whilst fleeing a tiger attack, finds himself deep within the Five Elements Mountain, prison to the impish Wukong for 500 years. Having spectacularly dispatched the tiger (rather too enthusiastically for some animal lovers, it may be said), Wukong is visited by the Goddess Guanyin (Kelly Chan) and summoned to accompany Xuanzang on a journey west to acquire ancient Buddhist scrolls, or sutras, that will calm the natural order of Earth. The pair are accompanied by two of the book’s most beloved characters, pig/man Baije (Xiao Shenyang) and blue-skinned water spirit, Wujing (Him Law). 

Soon, supernatural villainy arises in the form of beautiful but lethal White Bone Spirit, Baigujing, played with a seething malevolence by the terrific Gong Li. The actress dominates every scene she’s in, her larger-than-life presence and ethereal beauty perfect for the role. Wukong’s role as bodyguard and protector of Xuanzang leads to a series of spectacular wire-&-CGI encounters with Baigujing and her scantily clad demonic minions (who may prove too nightmarish for the under 10 audience). The film poses some unexpectedly weighty moral questions when the hero is called upon to defend his charge against spirits in the guise of a young girl and her mother; this ‘death of the innocents’ moment is a bold move in a fantasy pic and one that the director and the writing team of Ran Ping, Ran Jianan, Elvis Man and Yin Yiyi pull off with maturity and grace.

In terms of cultural impact and literary significance, perhaps the closest that western audiences have to Wu Cheng’en’s 16^th century text is Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings books. And not unlike The Two Towers, the second cinematic chapter of the Rings Trilogy, The Monkey King 2 proves by any measure a superior work to its predecessor. At 120 minutes, it also shares a hefty running time with Peter Jackson’s film that feels over indulgent at times, but that minor complaint want prove any hindrance at all to mainland audiences and Chinese diaspora worldwide. New Years celebrations (and global box office for international distributor China Lion) will be enhanced by arguably the finest big-screen vision to date of Chinese culture’s most beloved literary figure.

THE AGE OF ADALINE

Stars: Blake Lively, Michiel Huisman, Harrison Ford, Ellen Burstyn, Kathy Baker, Amanda Crew and Anthony Ingruber.
Writer: J. Miles Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz.
Director: Lee Toland Krieger.

Rating: 4/5

After his acid-tongued, ultra-contemporary take on burdened romance in 2012’s Celeste and Jesse Forever, director Lee Toland Krieger embraces a far more fantastical and glowingly cinematic incantation of fateful love with his follow-up, The Age of Adaline.

Boldly departing from her small-screen persona in her first film-carrying lead role, Blake Lively plays Adaline Bowman, a well-to-do turn-of-the-century 29 year-old whose life appears cut short when her car plunges into river waters turned freezing by a freak North Californian snowfall. Taking its mystical cue from the likes of Back to the Future and The Natural, a bolt of lightning strikes her over-turned vehicle and affords Adaline the apparent virtue of eternal youth.

A soothing voice-over smartly imbues the premise with credible fantasy and a lovingly cinematic extended montage (recalling the weepy opening from Pixar’s Up) leads to the modern day, where the still 29 year-old Adaline lives a work-focussed life in a very photogenic San Francisco. After eight decades, she no longer indulges in notions of romance; her blessing has become a curse, her life spent alone, bar the companionship of her now aged daughter, Flemming (Ellen Burstyn). But Adaline’s existential defences are worn down by the persistent romancing of rich philanthropist, Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman, very charming), who whisks his dream girl off to a family get-together on their lush estate.

The second-act kicker brings added emotional depth, when Ellis’ father William lays eyes upon Adaline and both are gripped by overwhelming memories of the soulful romance they shared 50-odd years hence. As William, Harrison Ford emerges as Krieger's trump card; the moment when they reconnect, and William’s intellectualism is confronted by a torrent of emotions, represents some of Ford’s best ever frames of film. It is a raw, vulnerable performance that ensures the film soars and draws fresh reserves out of Lively (the definition of 'Supporting Actor', surely); their scenes together are deeply moving, transcending any ‘fantasy genre’ trappings. (Kudos, too, to the casting department for finding Anthony Ingruder, whose physical and vocal rendering of a twenty-something Ford in flashback is uncanny).

Krieger’s vivid, melancholic melodrama emerges as a major work in the tough-to-pull-off ‘romantic fantasy’ genre subset. The cult fan base that fondly recall Jeannot Szwarc’s Somewhere in Time, the Christopher Reeve/Jane Seymour weepie from 1980 in which self-hypnosis brings together lovers born 100 years apart, will adore the narrative boldness that Krieger employs and the visual richness that DOP David Lanzenberg paints with to sell the premise. Nor will they bat a tear-sodden eyelid at the multi-generational leaps in logic that scriptwriters J. Miles Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz slyly ask of their audience.

Revelling in the role that will come to define her transition from tabloid starlet to bigscreen A-lister, Lively exhibits maturity beyond her years and recalls the incandescent bigscreen presence of the likes of Jessica Lange, Eva Marie Saint or Françoise Dorléac. The Oscar-worthy work of Australian costumer Angus Strathie (Moulin Rouge, Catwoman) never overwhelms the star, although it has every right to. Fittingly, all below-the-line department heads - Claudia Pare’s production design; Martina Javorova’s art direction; Shannon Gottlieb’s set decoration - on The Age of Adaline bring their A-game.

SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN

Stars: Kristen Stewart, Charlize Theron, Chris Hemsworth, Bob Hoskins, Ian McShane, Nick Frost, Toby Jones, Ray Winstone, Sam Claflin and Eddie Marsan.
Writers: Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini.
Director: Rupert Sanders

Rating: 3.5/5

An expansive retelling of the Brothers Grimm classic, Snow White and The Huntsman takes its most impactful beats from such post-modern literary adaptations as 1998s The Man in the Iron Mask and Peter Jackson’s …Rings trilogy, as well as vivid fantasy imaginings such as Willow and Ladyhawke. That it doesn’t really nail a flavour all its own is ok; it mimics the best bits of other movies so well, there’s plenty of enjoyment to be had even if none of it substantially resonates.

There are incongruities that should sink first-time director Rupert Sanders’ big, ballsy mash-up of feminine generational conflict and throne-room treachery. Kristen Stewart is both too old to convince as a virginal vision of purity and too small to be an armour-clad leader of misfit revolutionaries, but she makes it work; there’s a lean mid-section to the film that belies its meagre fairy tale origins, but the padding-out of these scenes is expertly done; and, as the evil witch-queen Raveena, who yearns to consume the essence of her fairer foe, Charlize Theron chews the scenery like a termite plague – and is all the more awesome for it.

An opening sequence that steeps the film in ruthless royal intrigue and murderous betrayal sets the tone for a narrative that may prove a little too dark for the wee ones who were enchanted by Disney’s “hi-ho-ing” animated take. A stepmother usurping the kingdom of a monarch she murders and imprisoning his princess, rightful heiress to the land, then existing in youthful perpetuity by sucking the rich soulfulness of her subjects certainly makes for a compelling set-up. But parents, beware; under 10’s will spend more of the 125 minute running time averting their eyes than you may have expected.

As a blossoming Snow White, It-girl Stewart affords us glimpses of the compelling screen actress she is destined to become. Her strong presence and china-doll bone-structure recalling a young Nicole Kidman, she exudes a teary innocence in the film’s early stages before transforming into a warrior princess. One can’t dismiss her mousiness – she is definitely not physically right for the role – but it is impossible not to be compassionate for her plight, so engaging is her star power. As The Huntsman, Chris Hemsworth confidently continues his ascension to stardom, his brawniness recalling a young, in-his-prime Nick Nolte.

Tech credits, especially the work of the visual effects team, are superlative. The morphing of full-size actors such as Ray Winstone, Bob Hoskins, Eddie Marsan, Nick Frost and Toby Jones into a feisty band of dwarves is seamless; an extended sequence set in a fantastical netherworld, whilst thin on plotting, is a sight to behold. Grandly-staged battle sequences that lead to the film’s denouement are suitably exciting.