Mirrormask

Honestly, I hated this movie, but I’m pretty sure that there’s a strong audience for it among comic-book reading, fantasy-fan goth kids. So if you’re one of those, you should totally check this out. The vast majority of the film is a dream sequence, and it’s really just an excuse for director/animator Dave McKean to show off how much of his style he’s ripped off from the likes of Jan Svankmajer, the Brothers Quay, and that shy kid who lived down the street from you who wore a lot of eyeliner and used to draw pictures of menacing harlequins. On the other hand, Stephanie Leonidas is great as Helen, a young circus performer whose mother is desperately ill. Helen enters a strange dream world where metaphors of growing up keep bonking her on the head and everything is sort of brown-colored and creepy looking. The film is written by Neil Gaiman, and if you like his stuff, you might enjoy it. If, like me, you find his ideas interesting and his prose intolerable, well, let’s just say that in this film the ideas are mimicking the prose.