Descendants: The Rise of Red (2024)

The Descendants franchise returns for a fourth installment, a time-travel musical in which the daughters of the Queen of Hearts and Cinderella tumble backward through a magic pocket watch to stop a schoolyard prank from hardening a future tyrant. Jennifer Phang directs with the brisk cheer of someone who understands the assignment. The film is bright, tuneful, and entirely harmless, which is either a recommendation or a diagnosis depending on the viewer's tolerance for flamingo-feathered cupcakes.

Where the production registers most distinctly is in its casting. Malia Baker and Kylie Cantrall carry the leads, Brandy returns as Cinderella opposite Paolo Montalban's King Charming, and the ensemble is a broad, multiethnic assembly that treats the fairy-tale canon as a colorblind playground. Phang's presence behind the camera, plus the film's fixation on two girls and their complicated mothers, lends a faint current of empowerment. It is girlish rather than insurgent. The screenplay has no interest in race as a subject, no class critique, no environmental sermon, no body-image discourse. The villainy on display is inherited, not economic.

The moral instruction arrives wrapped in song and choreography, which softens it into something closer to a lullaby than a lecture. Empathy, kindness, the possibility of redemption: these are the lessons, delivered gently and often. The result is a film that knows exactly what it is and declines to reach for anything more strenuous. It shattered streaming records, produced a sequel, and will be forgotten by adults before the credits finish scrolling. For its intended audience, that is presumably plenty.