Mirror Mirror (2012)

Mirror Mirror arrives from 2012, directed by Tarsem Singh, a filmmaker of immense visual appetite and limited interest in narrative momentum. Julia Roberts plays the Evil Queen Clementianna as an insecure social climber, Lily Collins plays Snow White as a chipper ingénue, and Armie Hammer plays a prince who spends much of the running time as a lovesick puppy. The costumes, the last work of Eiko Ishioka, are extraordinary. The film around them is a slow, ornamental drift.

On the progressive ledger, the film makes a few modest entries. Snow White trains with the seven dwarfs, leads them into combat, duels the prince, and reclaims her throne by her own hand, which is a gentle revision of the passive heroine. The dwarfs, meanwhile, rob the Queen's tax collector and hand the proceeds back to the impoverished townspeople, a Robin Hood flourish that gestures at class resentment without ever committing to it. The Queen's crushing taxation is the villainy on display, but the film treats poverty as set dressing for a heist sequence.

Beyond those gestures, the cupboard is bare. The kingdom is a white European fairy tale and never glances at race or identity. There is no queer presence, no environmental concern, no interest in neurodivergence, and no modern reckoning with beauty standards, even though the Queen's fear of aging provides the comic engine. The moralizing is faint and cheerful: inner beauty matters, kindness wins, and the mirror house shatters. A viewer hunting for contemporary social consciousness will find a mild girl-power coat of paint over a conventional romance. The dwarfs care about each other more than anyone else in the picture. Ebert said as much. So does the mirror.