mirabella on movies

I enjoyed Gone Girl on every level on which it’s possible to enjoy a movie: as entertainment, as comedy, as art, as a masterful display of...

Without a doubt, this brutal, angry, violent film is not for everyone.  But if you can get on its wavelength, it reveals itself as probably ...

As a character, Peter Parker / Spider-Man is fascinating.  The story of an unpopular, picked-on science geek orphan suddenly acquiring super...

When you get right down to it, The Help is a film about exploited people made by their exploiters for the enjoyment of the exploiters.  It ...

my list of the ten best films of the year along with a few honorable and dishonorable mentions. (and yes, i know we’re almost halfway thro...

We seem to have reached a point with the big Hollywood summer blockbusters where as long as they aren’t failures on every level, critics wil...

It’s not terribly surprising that former music video director Francis Lawrence has, with Water for Elephants , made a handsomely mounted but...

Basically all this film is saying is, 'Hey, weren’t those first two Saw movies cool?'  It's not an advancement of the form in a...

Make no mistake, TRON: Legacy is a terrible terrible film.  It’s staggeringly stupid, one of the most preposterous things I've ever see...

Forget all the hype about this being the first great movie of the twenty-first century or the film that defines a generation; The Social Net...

It’s all Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro’s fault.  I’m not positive that they originated it, but ever since they popularized it in Mean St...

That Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 is the first half of a two-film finale to an eight-film series makes it clear that this i...

At this point, if you buy a ticket to a Tony Scott film, you ought to know exactly what you’re getting: a serviceable thriller, probably sta...

With every successive film, Danny Boyle’s style has become more frantic and aggressive.   Trainspotting , made fifteen years ago, was fast-p...

As much as I like Let the Right One In , Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 Swedish film on which Let Me In is based, I think there could be some value...

Though it’s a fairly conventional film in a genre that’s been done to death (Michael Mann’s Heat being the most obvious reference point), Th...

After intercutting events on the island with flashbacks for three seasons, flashforwards for one season and between two separate timelines ...

With very few exceptions, almost every film about a hitman tells one of three stories: the hitman falls in love (usually with the target), t...

After the creative resurgence that was season four , I had high hopes going into the fifth season that Lost was really going to be something...

Though it’s not nearly as offensive or misogynist, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is Twilight for hipster nerds.  Like Twilght , Scott Pilgri...

After the mind-blowing three-part finale of season three that saw the introduction of recurring flashforwards as an ongoing storytelling de...

Three seasons in and a pattern has begun to emerge in both the individual episodes and the seasons as a whole: they start off strong, with a...

It becomes clear about two or three episodes into Lost ’s second season that the writers have little to no interest in the survival aspects ...

There are some really inventive, really interesting things going on in this film.  And there are also some incredibly stupid, incredibly ann...

As easy as it is to hate on every Shyamalan film since Unbreakable ( Signs , The Village , The Lady in the Water , The Happening ) there’s ...