Avis des critiques

"Cruella" is as big on toxic female rivalry as [Gillespie's] 2017 figure-skating drama "I, Tonya," and infused with a similar knowing ripeness that brings it to the brink of panto. What sets it apart from the studio’s recent suite of blockbuster remakes... is its willingness to zag off at a tangent, and try out its iconic central character in an appealing new context.

It’s the way this tepid film operates that makes it galling... "Cruella" takes one of the richest narrative archetypes — the madwoman — and whittles her down into a glossy, hollow, capitalism-approved monster fueled by girl-boss politics. It has nothing to say about how women move through the world.

Purists may balk, but viewers who think of this less as a reboot of Dodie Smith’s memorable monster and more as a Disney spin on Derek Jarman’s “Jubilee” for gay 8-year-olds will find “Cruella” to be flashy fun, even at a slightly bloated two-hours-plus running time.

"Cruella" does something that, honestly, most Disney “remakes” should do, and that’s tossing the original material, and starting from scratch, re-contextualizing the ingredients and inventing something new... Paired with a flamboyant Emma Stone as Cruella de Vil herself, there’s something continuously compelling about "Cruella’s" stuffed, sleek package.

[An] absurdly overlong, tolerably entertaining romp... Just-about family friendly, reasonably funny throughout, Craig Gillespie’s film, profiting greatly from Jenny Beavan’s fabulous costumes, continues the Mouse House’s tradition of restructuring historical ambience... as easily digestible wonderland. There is corporate genius there.

There's no denying that "Cruella" is stylish and kinetic, with a nasty edge that's unusual for a recent Disney live-action feature. But it's also exhausting, disorganized, and frustratingly inert, considering how hard it works to assure you that it's thrilling and cheeky.

"Cruella" confounds expectations in mostly delightful ways, particularly for what amounts to a supervillain origin-story prequel inspired by a 60-year-old animated movie. Credit much of that to a twin dose of Emma power -- as in Stone and Thompson -- in a movie that might owe its life to "101 Dalmatians," but which centers around a tasty cat fight.

Cruella is more interested in being an edgy heist movie-meets-"Devil Wears Prada" riff... The costuming, by Jenny Beavan, is indeed exquisite; her ornate designs deserve a smarter, sharper showcase than Gillespie affords them. "Cruella" is otherwise a thin Tim Burton knockoff, elaborately constructed but from lesser material, fraying all over.

While there’s energy and edge to the picture, "Cruella" feels stitched together from different influences in order to justify a rather blatant attempt to renew interest in a moribund property.

For all its fleshing out of the truth of who Cruella “really is,” the movie can’t escape the pure fact of the bad girl being more fun to watch than her normie alter ego... Yeah, sure, the movie puts up a little bit of a fight, makes her atone in all the right ways, does what it has to do to remain plausible as a movie for kids, to the extent that children’s fare is still Disney’s main business. I’m honestly not so sure.

While [the film's] surface pleasures are dazzling — if a bit protracted, at well north of two hours — it finally suggests that memorable screen villainy and complex inner humanity may be forced into a kind of stalemate, at least when there’s a corporate-branded intellectual property involved. “Cruella” isn’t a bad movie, even if its heroine is nowhere near bad enough.

“Cruella” proves ingeniously creative in its reimagining of the underlying IP... “Cruella” stands on its own, to the extent that Disney could have changed the title character’s name, and the resulting movie would still have been a slyly empowering underdog story — especially for those who see themselves in the put-upon assistant position of “The Devil Wears Prada.”