Aspiring fashionista Cruella is out for her boss’s skin in a riotous 101 Dalmatians origin-myth set in 70s London, starring Emmas Stone and Thompson in dynamic form
Kindly step back and make way for a sensational couple of Emmas: Stone and Thompson. Together, they are the highly strung dysfunctional double-act that post-lockdown cinema didn’t know it needed.
There’s an unexpectedly huge amount of old-fashioned fun to be had in Disney’s spectacular new origin-myth story from screenwriters Aline Brosh McKenna, Kelly Marcel and Steve Zissis, prebooting Cruella de Vil, the wicked dognapper from One Hundred and One Dalmatians. She is now an icily supercool supervillain, and Stone gives it everything she’s got – which is a considerable amount – as Estella, a young orphan girl with a genetic quirk of black-and-white hair. I was hoping for some Susan Sontag gags, but you can’t have everything. She grows up in glam-rock
London of the mid-1970s, a world of Izal loo paper, Ford Anglia
police cars and Golden Wonder crisps, living in a Faginesque thieves’ lair presided over by two dodgy scallywags, Jasper (Joel Fry) and Horace (Paul Walter Hauser), who took her in when she was a stroppy homeless waif and schooled her in the ways of thievery.