For Fans of Roald Dahl

That is a big claim and it holds. Dahl stacks the deck mercilessly: a genius child, two monstrous parents, a sadistic headmistress, and one good adult. Then he gives Matilda telekinesis, which is the book being honest about what it is, a power fantasy for every child who ever felt overlooked and underestimated. The catharsis when Trunchbull runs screaming is not cheap; it is earned over 200 pages of accumulated injustice. The 2022 musical film adaptation by Matthew Warchus is the rare case of a Dahl adaptation that genuinely improves on the source by adding songs that say what the prose could only imply.

Most readers know the children's books, but Dahl spent decades writing short fiction for adults, collected in volumes like Tales of the Unexpected and Someone Like You. These stories are colder, more cynical, and funnier in a way that makes you feel slightly guilty about laughing. The twist endings are earned, not cheap, because Dahl builds each story on a perfectly ordinary social situation, a dinner party, a wine bet, a marriage, and then reveals the one wrong note underneath. The BBC adaptations of these ran for years for good reason.

Dahl distrusted adaptations, and had notoriously strong opinions about them. Wes Anderson's stop-motion Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) is the clearest counterargument. It keeps the bones of Dahl's story, a fox who steals from three terrible farmers and pays for it, and layers Anderson's own themes of inadequacy and family underneath. The result is one of the most purely enjoyable family films of the 2000s, one that works for children on one level and for adults reading Dahl's own anxieties about fatherhood on another.