‘Pinocchio’ Review: Tom Hanks Can’t Save Robert Zemeckis’ Latest Soulless, Weird, Uncanny Valley Effort
Here’s one hell of a way to remember just how strange “Pinocchio” (1940) was: watch Robert Zemeckis’ hallucinatory live-action remake of it, now playing on Disney+. Some of the kooky parts here are not from the script by Simon Farnaby and Chris Weitz—to their credit, they didn’t invent the hedonistic sugary kid-hell of Pleasure Island, or the concept of an innocent boy whose wooden appendage grows, or a lonely man’s fixation on having a manic pixie dream son (Italian author Carlo Collodi did).