The film's story is an example of w

The film's story is an example of what The Guardian's film critic Peter Bradshaw calls "that emerging post-'Wicked' genre, the revisionist-backstory fairytale," but it's affecting. It has a primordial edge that the clumsy filmmaking can't blunt. There are moments in "Maleficent" that are profoundly disturbing, in the way that ancients myths and Grimm fairy tales are disturbing. They strike to the heart of human experience and create the kinds of memories that young children—young girls particularly—will obsess over, because on some level they'll know, even without the benefit of adult experience, that the film is telling them a horrible sort of truth.