Beauty and the Beast

Bill Condon faced an impossible task: remaking a fairy tale that had already been made perfectly, by Jean Cocteau in 1946. Rather than compete, he made a film about the Cocteau film. The living household objects — the candelabra, the clock — are direct quotations from Cocteau's surrealist production design, where human arms emerge from castle walls to hold light. Condon cited this in 2017 interviews repeatedly, treating Cocteau's vision as material to preserve rather than revise. La Belle et la Bête is available on Criterion Channel.