Disney’s latest holiday horror masquerading as a family film. The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is the potentially sweet story of a girl, Clara (Mackenzie Foy), whose mother died and leaves her a small locked orb, which Clara must find the key to, and the key is in a magical land full of castles and candy and snowflakes and flowers and clowns and possessed toys and abandoned amusement parks and towering rodent giants. Then there are also a couple of gorgeous ballet sequences starring famous ballerina Misty Copeland. The whole experience is all over the place; I’d estimate that the 100-minute runtime was about 25 minutes boring exposition, 45 minutes of decent Narnia/Hugo-esque fantasy adventure, ten minutes of ethereal dancing, and 20 minutes of pure nightmare fuel. by Elinor Jones