Movie reviews

It’s the Snow White story, of course, but through a glass darkly.

Mirror Mirror (PG) is the latest offbeat, knowing take on a classic fairytale, in which the Queen (Julia Roberts) informs us, by way of voiceover narration, that this represents her version of events.

Were that gambit true it might have made Mirror Mirror a far more intriguing prospect, but really, it’s only in there to account for the director, Tarsem Singh, making more use of the wicked queen role than the Snow White tale generally allows for. Well, if you’ve managed to snare Julia Roberts, it’s a good idea to milk her for everything she’s got. For the most part the story runs along conventional lines: neglected princess Snow White (Lily Collins) threatens to steal the handsome Prince Alcott (Armie Hammer) out from under the cash-strapped, emotionally needy queen’s nose, and is sentenced to a grisly death in the forest. When the queen’s faithful retainer Brighton (Nathan Lane) can’t stomach the prospect of murder, he tells Snow White to run — and run she does, right into the arms of a gang of stilt-walking bandits, aka the Seven Dwarves. Can Snow White and her diminutive new friends restore peace and harmony to the kingdom by overthrowing the tyrannical queen? Irreverent in tone, Singh’s movie attempts to cover quite a lot of bases — it’s a cynically humorous gothic fairytale spoof, boasting romance and action in equal measure — and almost inevitably falls short. That said, the set-piece scenes are well executed, the humour is deftly observed, and the excellent cast all enter into the spirit of knowing parody, with Roberts happy to play the wicked queen with a straight face. All told, it’s good old-fashioned happily-ever-after fun.

The ending to Titanic 3D (12A) hasn’t become any happier in the years since James Cameron’s epic first appeared in 1997, but the film is so long that you may well have forgotten all about the dastardly slab of ice by the time it rears its ugly head. This is essentially two films for the price of one, the first featuring working-class Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) wooing upper-class Rose (Kate Winslet) on the maiden voyage of the world’s most famous ocean liner, a gloriously cynical fable of Eden in which the innocence of a prelapsarian world (aka pre-WWI Edwardian England) gets holed beneath the waterline because Rose and Jack tempt the wrath of the gods by falling in love across the class barriers. Cue the iceberg, a collision with which sets in train an entirely different kind of film, fuelled by terror, horror, pity and an undeniable schadenfreude. One of the great Hollywood success stories — made for $200m, and expected to sink Cameron, the movie grossed over $2bn worldwide and made him the King of Hollywood, if not the world — the tale does, to paraphrase Celine Dion, go on and bloody on. If you’re in the mood for a lavish epic, though, Titanic 3D on the big screen won’t disappoint.

Adapted from a novel by Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbo, Headhunters (16s) stars Askel Hennie as Roger, a businessman small in stature but determined to do whatever it takes to impress his statuesque wife, Diana (Synnøve Macody Lund), even if that involves masterminding the theft of expensive artworks. A likeable cove, Roger’s life is thrown out of kilter when the handsome (and tall) Clas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) worms his way into the Browns’ lives. Can Roger cope with the pressure? Directed by Morten Tyldum, Headhunters is a fast-paced paranoid thriller that resembles nothing less than a Norwegian Coen brothers’ farce, laced with shards of coal-black humour and featuring enough twists and turns to give a corkscrew whiplash. Terrific fun.

A Cat in Paris (PG) is another foreign offering that takes an offbeat look at the crime narrative, in this case a bizarre animated tale of a cat burglar who prowls the Parisian night accompanied by an actual cat and a young girl, and who gets mixed up with a ruthless gang of art thieves and the cop on their trail. The hand-drawn animation is deliberately styled with a retro feel, as is the story itself, and while it’s all very charming, the novelty does begin to pall long before the final credits appear.