Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticA few weeks ago, there was every reason to be skeptical about “Cruella.” The creative track record for live-action remakes of Disney animated films was middling to dismal (the only one of the recent wave I thought worked was “The Lion King,” and most critics would say I’m dead wrong on that one).
And this wasn’t even a remake of the winsome 1961 cartoon “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” (we got that top-heavy mediocrity in 1996, presaging Disney’s recent strip-mining of its own past).
The new film was to be an idiosyncratic spin-off origin story, clocking in at two hours and 14 minutes. But as audiences have been discovering, “Cruella” isn’t just better than you might expect.
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