Hayley Atwell – Memphis Flyer

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

It wasn’t obvious at the time, but in 1980, one of the most significant movies in the history of American cinema was filmed in the woods around Morristown, Tennessee. The Evil Dead was the brain child of Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, who scrounged together just enough money to pay a 13-person crew to live in a broke-down cabin for a few miserable months. Raimi, who was 20 years old at the time, combined the supernatural horror of The Exorcist and the slasher gore of Halloween with the slapstick comedy of The Three Stooges. In the editing room, Raimi met Joel Coen, who, inspired by the fledgeling director’s can-do spirit, convinced his brother Ethan to make their own low-budget indie film, Blood Simple. After a rapturous review by Stephen King, The Evil Dead became a wildly profitable cult classic.

In 1990, the year after Tim Burton’s Batman, Raimi directed Darkman, an original superhero film starring a young Liam Neeson. When the now-disgraced director Bryan Singer’s X-Men films took off in the late 90s, Raimi’s innovative vision earned him the director’s chair for Spider-Man. When the Marvel Cinematic Universe launched with Iron Man in 2008, it resembled Raimi’s light-dark, comedy-drama tone more than Christopher Nolan’s gritty, sour Batman Begins.

Raimi felt burned by the mixed reaction to Spider-Man 3 and stopped making superhero movies until Disney loaded up the money truck to lure him into helming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It’s the best investment the House of Mouse has made in a long time.

Xochitl Gomez, Benedict Wong, and Benedict Cumberbatch go Dutch angle.

Benedict Cumberbatch returns as Dr. Stephen Strange, the former surgeon turned sorcerer who was the brains behind the world-saving operation when the Avengers took on Thanos. The film opens with Strange and America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) soaring through an aerobatic sequence recalling the beginning of Revenge of the Sith. But when the sorcerer falls to a space demon, we learn that this is not THE Doctor Strange, but merely A Doctor Strange from a different corner of the multiverse. America is a wild magic talent who can travel between realities, and someone is sending giant tentacle monsters after her.

That someone turns out to be Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), the Avenger who has completed her heel turn into the Scarlett Witch after creating her own sitcom pocket universe in WandaVision. She is seeking a universe where the two sons she never had in this world actually exist, and that means stealing America’s power. Strange realizes she has been corrupted by the Darkhold, a tome of forbidden chaos magic, and seeks the mythical Book of Vishanti, which contains spells to counter Wanda’s newfound might.

Rachel McAdams, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Xochitl Gomez step between worlds.

Marvel comics appropriated the concept of the multiverse from quantum physics to explain the contradictions between different writers’ versons of their heroes histories, and now, with Everthing Everywhere All At Once and Rick and Morty, the concept has invaded mainstreams pop culture. With writer Michael Waldron (who won an Emmy for the Rick and Morty episode “The Vat of Acid”), Raimi milks the multiverse for all kinds of fun romps over its spry, two-hour running time. His restless camera swoops and dives, pushes in for comic effect, and pulls back to shoot fights like MGM dance sequences—especially in a music-themed magic duel which brings super-genius Danny Elfman’s score to the fore.

Cumberbatch is loose, playful, and supremely confident as Marvel’s resident magical curmudgeon. Olsen adds dark nuance to her sympathetic WandaVision interpretation of Scarlet Witch, creating the best super hero-villain pairing since Black Panther and Killmonger. The multiverse story creates opportunities to introduce all kinds of new characters and variations on old ones, and then kill them off without consequence. In one parallel Earth, we meet a version of Agent Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) who took the supersoldier serum instead of Steve Rogers, and put the Union Jack on her shield. (Why does Captain Carter get a jetpack when Captain American doesn’t?) There’s also an emotional appearance by the great Patrick Stewart as an alternate Charles Xavier, who matches minds with Wanda. And of course, the legendary Bruce Campbell has a brilliant comedic cameo.

After a series of Marvel movies that range from the bloated Infinity War saga to the ho-hum Eternals, this is an exciting, visually inventive adventure actually worth the money to see on the big screen. Sam Raimi doesn’t need $200 million to make a great film, but when he has it, he shows everyone how it’s done.

It was strange to watch Disney’s new, live-action Cinderella so soon after seeing Into the Woods. In Stephen Sondheim’s fairy tale musical mashup, Cinderella, who was played in last year’s film adaption by the extraordinarily talented Anna Kendrick, is a flighty, witty presence who toys with the Prince because she can’t seem to make up her mind about much of anything. But the new Disney Cinderella played by Downton Abbey‘s Lily James is none of those things, which is why Sondheim’s take on the character is labeled “revisionist.” For better or worse, this Cinderella is as familiar and unthreatening as Disney’s branding department needs her to be.

The director Disney chose to revamp the intellectual property Walt appropriated from the cultural commons of fairy tale land is Kenneth Branagh. A prolific Irish stage actor who was hailed as the second coming of Sir Lawrence Olivier, Branagh is no stranger to screen adaptations, having began his film career in 1989 the same way Oliver did in 1944, with a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Henry V. And while he has done yeoman’s work adopting the Bard over the years (Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Hamlet), lately, he’s found success adopting Marvel heroes (Thor) and Tom Clancy novels (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit).

Even working within the Disney corporate environment, Branagh’s hand is evident in Cinderella. He approaches this adaptation in the same classy way he approaches Shakespeare. But here’s the thing: It’s not the Grimm version of the tale he’s adopting, like Sondheim did in Into the Woods. Nor is it the 17th-century French version of the tale Cendrillon, which introduced the Fairy Godmother and the glass slippers. Branagh’s bailiwick is to adopt Disney’s 1950 animated musical Cinderella into a live-action, non-musical version.

I’m still pondering why anyone thought this would be a good idea. Cinderella is extremely important to Disney. It’s widely credited as being the film that saved the studio, reversing Walt’s sliding fortunes after a decade of war and bad luck had pushed him to the brink of bankruptcy. After all, Disneyland’s centerpiece is Cinderella’s Castle. It’s built right into their corporate logo. And no one has been more successful with musicals in the 21st century than Disney, as hordes of parents who can’t get “Let It Go” from Frozen out of their heads will be the first to tell you. So why strip out the music from the corporate flagship, dooming it from the very beginning to be a tinny echo of the original?

Branagh does his best, as he always does, and over all, the production benefits from his taste and style. Cinderella reads Pepys to her melancholy father (Ben Chaplin) after her mother (Hayley Atwell of Agent Carter fame) dies. The diction is much higher than with most movies aimed primarily at preteen girls, with narrator and Fairy God Mother Helena Bonham Carter opining about how “economies were taken” when Cinderella’s father dies offscreen, leaving her stepmother (Cate Blanchett, who steals every scene she’s in) and stepsisters Drisella (Sophie McShera) and Anastasia (Holliday Grainger) without any means of support. James’ Cinderella and the Prince (Richard Madden from Game of Thrones) actually have good chemistry, and they appropriately share some of the film’s best scenes together, such as when Branagh has them circle each other on horseback when they first meet in the forest, and when they steal away during the ball so he can show her his “secret garden.” Visually, the director takes frequent inspiration from the animated version, from the color coding of the wicked stepsisters to the way Cinderella’s pumpkin coach dissolves when the Fairy Godmother’s spell wears off.

Branagh’s swooping camera and sumptuous CGI palaces look good enough, but they can’t replace the classic, hand-drawn animation of the old-school Cinderella. And even without the songs, this version is almost 50 minutes longer than the classic. Most of the extra running time comes in the beginning, when Branagh spends time exploring more of the family’s backstory, although he wisely gives Blanchett’s Wicked Stepmother as much screen time as possible. Cinderella‘s not a bad movie, per se, it’s just turgid, overly long, and desperate for a reason to exist beyond the boffo box office numbers it put up last weekend. But we all know that, for the House of Mouse, $132 million is reason enough.