REVIEW: Mirror Mirror Dazzles with Color, Wit and Just the Right Amount of Wickedness

There’s plenty of spectacle in movies these days; it’s delight that’s in short supply, and Tarsem Singh’s Mirror Mirror offers plenty of it, shimmering like a school of minnows in a reflective pond. The picture is gorgeous to look at: There are fairytale castles topped with minarets of fluted gold, interior marble archways that look as if they might have been carved by Alfonse Mucha, ball gowns that take their inspiration from the rock-star effrontery of peacock feathers. But the story is a delight, too, a modernized -- but not too modernized -- retelling of the Brothers’ Grimm Snow White peopled with actors who polish the material to a bright glow rather than a high gloss. Mirror Mirror has a great deal of energy and wit and color, so much that it sometimes threatens to go right over the top. Somehow, though, it always stops short of being just too much -- it’s never too taken by its own reflection.
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