Movie Review: Angelina Jolie Stars in ‘Maleficent,’ From Disney

THE NEW YORK TIMES

By Manohla Dargis

A scene from “Maleficent,” featuring Angelina Jolie.

HOLLYWOOD---Angelina Jolie makes a fabulous monster. As the title character in “Maleficent” — a divertingly different rethink of an awfully old story — she breezes through the movie, part superstar, part superfreak. She wears them like a crown in this live-action postscript to the visually stunning 1959 Disney animated musical “Sleeping Beauty.” This time, the focus isn’t on the beautiful, blond Aurora, who falls into a deep, bewitched sleep after pricking her finger on a spindle, but rather on the sinister scene stealer who cursed her in a fit of pique and a puff of acid-green smoke. “Maleficent” tells a new kind of story about how we live now, not once upon another time. And it does so by suggesting, among other things, that budding girls and older women are not natural foes, even if that’s what fairy tales, Hollywood and the world like to tell us. [link]