MIRROR MIRROR [2012]

Director Tarsem Singh delivers yet another visually stunning feast for the eyes with his strange adaptation of the Snow White story, Mirror Mirror.
Here we have Snow enlisting the aid of seven tiny rebels to fight against the power-hungry queen and a savage beast that dwells deep within the forest that surrounds the poverty-stricken kingdom.
Singh is no stranger to astonishingly beautiful set-pieces and intricate costume designs but sadly he never seems to shy away from wafer-thin scripts and laughable melodrama.  Fortunately, as a first for Singh, he's inserted some humor into his storytelling and, although, funny, it almost always feels out of place from the rest of the film.  Nothing seems to comfortably fall into place with each other and ends up making for a very uneven mess.  As imaginative and original as it all is, you can't help but feel that everyone involved were all working on a different film.

2½ stilts out of 5

Immortals (2011)

Empty, vapid, insipid.

0 tanned, chiseled hardbodies out of 5

The Cell (2000)

J-Lo dives into the mind of a serial killer hoping to convince him to take her seriously now that she’s an actress in a real, genuine, honest to God film!
It's shallower than it pretends to be, step in it and your toes will barely get wet, but Tarsem makes his eye-candy so full of sugary goodness that it's possible to forgive the plot for the most part.
J-Lo says very little, mercifully, and when she does she whispers.
Vincent D'Onofrio has an intensely overbearing cinematic presence; without him it would be little more than a pretty moving painting that has a number of similarities to The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
Somehow, the individual parts combine to form something memorable that pleases me more than it probably should.

3½ milky white dolls out of 5