The Halloween hangover has barely begun and Hollywood is thinking about Christmas — with Disney leading the way with the new adventure “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms,” a colorful and frenetic adaptation of the perennial classic.
The movie starts with the basics of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story and Marius Petipa’s ballet: A girl named Clara (Mackenzie Foy) arrives at a Christmas party thrown by the eccentric inventor Drosselmeyer (Morgan Freeman), whose gift transports Clara to a magical world of snow and fairies and the menacing Mouse King.
The challenge with turning the classic “Nutcracker” into a movie, though, is that there’s no actual story.