Cruella (2021)

I watched this on a trans-Atlantic flight, which is always makes me a bit generous in my assessment of the worth of a movie (captive audience and all), but I enjoyed this. The cynical amongst us would note that there really is no need to know Cruella's back story, and that this is just a way to generate a movie without having to delve too deeply into the creation of a new character, but then that is a lot of what Disney is all about. The truth is just what you would suspect, that in order to end up at the point where one would consider making coats for humans out of a coat of a dog would have come from a traumatic childhood. Just how traumatic is what unfolds over the course of the movie, starting early on with witnessing the death of her mother, and finding herslef alone on the streets of London as a child without a cent to her name or a skill to go with it. There are two great Emma's (Emma Thompson and Emma Stone) and they both do well with what they are given, and I enjoyed this.