The Best: Cruella
If there was a film that signaled the return of movie theaters to the post-pandemic world, it was Disney’s Cruella. The idea of making a sympathetic prequel about one of the House of Mouse’s most reprehensible characters—she wanted to skin puppies, for god’s sake—seemed bad on paper, especially when the decidedly non-English Emma Stone was hired as the young de Ville and the plot seemed to be a carbon-copy of The Devil Wears Prada, just with Emma Thompson in Meryl Streep role. And while not everyone loved it, we thought Cruella was a blast—as fun, fierce, and flamboyant as the title character’s incredible outfits, and exactly the sort of classic movie-going experience we’d been missing over the previous year. It’s not a prequel to 101 Dalmatians, it’s a movie about an utterly fabulous anti-hero in the making.
