Telekinesis

1996 · Danny DeVito · 98 min · Comedy / Fantasy

Matilda is the Roald Dahl adaptation that understood the assignment, keep the cruelty cartoonish, the justice sweet, and the child's power absolutely real. Danny DeVito directs and narrates the story of a brilliant girl neglected by her game-show-brained parents and terrorized by a shot-putting headmistress, and Mara Wilson's calm, bookish gravity holds the whole fable together while the telekinesis escalates from levitating carrots to full poltergeist justice. The edges are properly dark for a family film and the finale wraps fast. A generation of readers, teachers, and librarians consider it sacred text, and the newt scene remains immortal.

1974 · Stephen King · 199 pages · Horror

Carrie is the book that started everything for Stephen King, and its power comes not from the telekinesis but from the cruelty that activates it. The epistolary format was experimental for horror fiction in 1974, and while the book is rougher than what followed, its central portrait of a girl destroyed by the people around her has lost none of its force.

2019 · Stephen King · 561 pages · Science Fiction, Thriller

The Institute is Stephen King returning to the subject of gifted children in captivity, and while the Firestarter comparisons are inevitable, this is a more politically charged and structurally deliberate novel. The kids are great. The facility is chilling. The resolution is where it stumbles, resolving a tightly wound thriller with mechanisms that feel too convenient for the stakes that preceded them.