Film
The Witches
- Director
- Robert Zemeckis
- Certificate
- PG
- Running Time
- 106 mins
Given that Nic Roeg made such a great job of his 1983 adaptation of the Roald Dahl fantasy classic, you can’t help but wonder why a director of Robert Zemeckis‘s stature agreed to do a “reimagining” for HBO, even though it’s co-produced by Guillermo del Toro.
This time, the setting is the late 1960s, Anne Hathaway takes the role of the grand high witch, and the boy who’s turned into a mouse is African-American (Codie-Lei Eastick, with Octavia Spencer as his grandmother). Dahl’s dark fables were always going to be catnip for cancel culture enthusiasts (The Witches is generally accused of misogyny), but this one fell foul of disability rights activists who argued that it perpetuated the depiction of limb differences as hideous. Critics were unimpressed too. “The spell does not get cast,” sniffed The Guardian. Oh and Ms. Hathaway was nominated for a Worst Actress gong at the Golden Raspberry Awards.
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