A whole new ball game
CRITIC’S CHOICE Cinderella U cert, 105 mins Kenneth Branagh’s live-action Cinderella is a tale-as-old-astime retelling, dressed up like a fairy-tale edition of Strictly Come Dancing. The main point of it is to appeal to the Frozen crowd – a mission Disney is so determined to accomplish, it has arranged for the new short semi-sequel, Frozen Fever, to precede the main film. However, Cinderella is not a sassy, wised-up revamp of picture-book lore, like Frozen. Instead, it sticks closely to the 1950 cartoon version, with just a few tactful innovations. Cate Blanchett is perfectly evil as Cinderella’s stepmother, Helena Bonham Carter is a fun fairy godmother, and costume designer Sandy Powell’s frocks threaten to steal the show. However, you feel throughout that the film is simply going through the motions. It’s all smoothly operated crane shots, excellent hair and gleaming teeth. Originality is the glass slipper it never even tries on. Tim Robey ALSO IN CINEMAS Get Hard 15 cert, 100 mins As an odd-couple comedy, Get Hard rarely gets laughs that actually need the two stars – Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart – to be on screen together. Ferrell’s best moments are typically in tight close-up – he hardly needs any context to crack you up with his emotional mania, as a hedge fund manager sentenced to 10 years in San Quentin for fraud he hasn’t actually perpetrated. Unfortunately, after he hires his valet car cleaner (Hart) to prepare him for his ordeal, the film surrenders to a toxic seam of racially inflected gay panic that kills any fun. If you don’t think repeated jokes about the prospect of black-on-white prison rape are quite enough to sustain a whole feature, tell that to the screenwriters. TR The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water U cert, 93 mins This feature-length edition of the long-running and mostly absurd Nickelodeon cartoon – featuring the voices of the regular cast, plus Antonio Banderas and, er, Alan Carr – is a cocktail of animation styles and live action. It resembles nothing so much as a pillowcase full of angry weasels, and finds ingenious ways to cram every scene with just one more loopy gag or slapstick thwack. It may not be the year’s best animated film, but it’s almost certainly the most. Robbie Collin Blind 18 cert, 95 mins Blind, a stunning Norwegian film about complete loss of vision, immediately cottons on to its rich paradox of subject and medium. How do you visualise not seeing? Ingrid, the character played by the pale, ghostly and beautiful Ellen Dorrit Petersen, has been suddenly afflicted in adulthood, and is too stricken with fear to step outside her sparsely furnished flat. The insecurities of any newly blind person, her susceptibility to being tricked, ignored, injured by everyday objects or even cheated on by a spouse, are the key themes in this radically first-person view of being not-sighted. The images and characters in this film are unstable, unreliable and shift without warning. They feel like acts of tremendous imaginative empathy. TR