Spy Kids may have had cooler action scenes, and Shrek had the puerile silliness, but looking back on the films I watched as a child, it’s the 1996 movie Matilda that I remember most fondly.
Starring Mara Wilson as the precocious daughter of two scamming boors, Matilda is a delightful and endearingly strange modern fairytale, a story about the triumph of kindness over cruelty that’s never preachy or predictable. Directed with oddball verve by Danny DeVito, who also stars as Matilda’s crooked father, it’s a children’s film that shares its young protagonist’s sense of wonder, set in a magical realist version of suburban California that feels brimming with life to this day.
