The furry blue foot remains very much within the box for Dean Fleischer Camp’s Lilo & Stitch, a live action replication of the Disney animated classic. 2002’s OG Hawaiian rollercoaster ride proved something of a rare bright spot in an era of woe for the House of Mouse. Amid a string of middling efforts in the noughties, only Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois’ toon enjoyed both critical and commercial success. Extoling the virtues of family and second chances, Lilo & Stitch struck a multi-generational chord, tickling the old and young alike. 2025’s effort boasts a little less Elvis but a lot more of the same.
A delectable premise finds maniacal delivery in Drop, a taut new thriller from Happy Death Day’s Christopher Landon. As penned by Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach, the film boasts the sort of idea so ripe for mining that it’s perplexing to think nobody has done so before. An AirDrop thriller for the iPhone era. Drop was, in fact, conceived only when the girlfriend of its executive producer, Sam Lerner, began receiving dodgy Shrek memes one night in a packed restaurant. It’s no huge leap to climb from crass to creepy and then on to criminal. In Landon’s hands, it’s splendidly scaled.
Somewhere between ‘poisoned apple’ and ‘fairest of them all’ lies a more nuanced assessment of Marc Webb’s Snow White than that widely available online. The film may not quite achieve irrefutable greatness but there’s certainly nothing here so insidious as to warrant the torrent of bad press that currently haunts the film. Snow White is, by all accounts, perfectly pleasant. It’s well cast, vibrantly hued and rousingly scored. In a Disney remake canon that also includes Robert Zemeckis’ Pinocchio and 2016 stinker Alice Through the Looking Glass, this one does nice business.
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