There’s always been a fairytale element to Kenneth Branagh’s directing career; the question of whether or not he’ll go to the ball tends to hang over all his movies, right up until the clock strikes 12.
One of Branagh’s finest fantasy flicks, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, was as cruelly treated as any of Charles Perrault’s fabled heroines, while the marvellously Ken Russell-esque The Magic Flute signally failed to be showered with riches or made the belle of any box-office ball. Meanwhile, the Hitchcock pastiche Dead Again went from being a copper-bottomed catastrophe to a Stateside hit after an 11th-hour sprinkling of fairy dust (in the form of reprocessed black-and-white flashbacks) turned it from pauper to princess. Most remarkably, Branagh took the straw of Marvel’s Thor comic strip and spun from it the gold of a surprisingly witty blockbuster (Transformers meets Xanadu), a remarkable feat of movie....
