She had known grief but she wore it well."

We know only that Tremaine is a widow who's just married a widower as clotheshorse double Oscar winner Cate Blanchett turns to the camera in editorial pose and technicolor-ready Sandy Powell couture. WERQ! The fashionable stepmother is instantly widowed again and Blanchett rocks one of the film's few colorless dresses with equally wicked elegance. So Ella is left lonely and unloved and working for, rather than living happily with, her cruel step-family, including spoiled brats Drisella (Downton Abbey's "Daisy" Sophie McSheara) and Anastasia (Holliday Grainger), who heap on the humiliations. 

The story beats are excessively familiar but who cares when a movie is this skillfully mounted and well acted? Director Kenneth Branagh, who has always been talented at marrying rich images, dramatic gravitas, and real levity (see Much Ado About Nothing or Dead Again or even Thor if you're feeling generous) brings his A game. His sense of staging, combined with the inspired production design and costuming really make the setpieces pop. The ball is otherwordly beautiful in every instance where you fear it'll become gaudy. Rarely do this many colors collide on screen without creating something muddy and gross like Tim Burton's Eyesore in Wonderland. Powell continually risks faintly ridiculous gowns -- all the colors of the rainbow all over the place, sometimes on the same dress-- but they only serve to make Cinderella's fairy-dusted blue beauty glow with comparatively minimalist beauty. Frankly the movie could have done without the ubiquitous CGI mice -- I was hoping the much cuter Lucifer would eat them -- and the comic excesses of the Fairy Godmother / Pumpkin sequences but it's a small price to pay for the magic elsewhere.

While screenwriter Chris Weitz (About a Boy) doesn't seek to upend or "explain" the usual story (the need for back-story and prequels has been killing fantasy and imagination!), he renovates successfully. His greatest redecorating triumph is the suble way he shifts the power / emotional dynamic between Cinderella and her Prince, and even Cinderella and her step-family. There's also a slight makeover for the Bachelor Prince. If he's still not a three-dimensional human he's a far more attractive Ken Doll, complete with anatomically smooth but super flattering bulge pants. (Can we just give Sandy Powell the costume Oscar now?).

None of these efforts are distractingly "twisty" but they go a long way in eradicating much of the fairy tale's most retrograde gender politics while also making its gold-digging aspirational fantasy more palatable. In fact, Lily James may be the first Cinderella to feel like a complete character with agency and thoughts and morality all her own who also still reads exactly like the passive "Cinderella" you know and maybe love sheepishly. All due respect to Drew Barrymore's instantly dated if delightful 1990s 'GIRLPOWER!' rendition in Ever After (1998) but this movie owns the myth while managing to inhabit it.

Color the new Disney blockbuster a major surprise. This pleasantly old-fashioned Cinderella is a surprising antidote to Hollywood's current often anachronistic and faux-"dark" twists on fairy tales -- most of them aren't dark at all; have you ever read the originals? They're grim(m). It's gorgeous. It's relatively smart. It's got heart. Given how oft-produced this particular story is though (let's call it the Hamlet of fairy tales and have a moratorium for awhile after this one, mmmkay?), if you don't have a sweet tooth for eye candy, you might want to sit this one out. The rest of us will be happy to hum along with Cinderella's beautiful daydream-singing and soak up all of its rich color and welcome humanity. "Be brave and kind" sure beats "Be rescued by a Prince & marry up!" as aspirational fantasies of happily ever-afters go.