Dir: Ava DuVernay (PG 107 mins)
Madeline L’Engle’s 1962 sci-fi novel gets the big screen treatment in this blockbuster helmed by the director of Selma, Ava DuVernay. The film follows a brilliant young girl Meg Murray played by Storm Reid, as she searches for her missing astrophysicist father, Chris Pine. He had discovered a new way to travel, a fifth dimension, a wrinkle in time as it were. Together with her brother and friend Calvin, played by Levi Miller she sets out to find her missing father and is aided by three mystical beings, Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which played by Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kalinga, and Oprah Winfrey. Together they must stop an evil descending over a world called Camatoz, where humans are plugged into a hive mind that renders them puppets. It’s a trippy new age sci-fi with nods to non conformity and a girl heroine who is smart and capable, a literary forerunner to the likes of Katniss Everdeen. Well read in the USA if less well known here, this is a worthy genre adventure with a multi-cultural cast that entertainingly preaches love and free thinking.
****
Out March 23