Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical (2022)

Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical arrives as the second cinematic treatment of the novel, filtered this time through Tim Minchin and Dennis Kelly's stage production, and it conducts itself with a restraint that feels almost antique. Here is a 2022 family musical about a gifted girl, a cruel headmistress, and a school built on terror, and at no point does it pause to instruct the audience on the correct politics of the moment. The children sing, the villain rages, the telekinesis arrives on schedule. It is, by the standards of its release year, a curiously unburdened piece of work.

The film does carry a mild progressive charge, mostly in its casting. Lashana Lynch plays Miss Honey and Sindhu Vee plays the librarian Mrs. Phelps, roles historically rendered in paler hues, and the film simply lets them be. No dialogue acknowledges the shift. No character explains it. The story concerns a brilliant girl dismissed by a father who wanted a son, who finds in Miss Honey a bond of female solidarity strong enough to topple a tyrant. That is a feminist shape, arrived at through plot instead of proclamation. Race never enters the narrative, and the film seems content to leave it there.

What moral instruction exists concerns bullies, courage, and the comforts of a chosen family, delivered through song and slapstick. Emma Thompson's Trunchbull is a monster of appetite and spite, not an ideological target. The result is a children's entertainment that trusts its audience to absorb the lesson without a lecture. Refreshing, if faintly nostalgic.