Waste of time

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

This film is about a con woman whose life is complicated by the appearance of an obsessive librarian.I had great expectations when the initial animation was showing. Could it be a film like "Lola Rennt"? Well, no. The plot could have been promising, but the way it is told makes the film not too gripping. It gets boring at times, because of the slow pace. Fortunately, the film is made up for by the tension between Christina Ricci and John Simm. John Simm's portrayal of an innocent man who becomes obsessive about Christina Ricci is remarkable. Christina Ricci is also great in her portrayals of a cold and passionless con woman, a manipulative woman and vulnerable victim at the end. In short, it is a little slow but still watchable.

This is an excellent film if you enjoy watching Christina Ricci walking and talking. She does these things very well and she looks very much like Wednesday Addams would look if she Wednesday had grown up. At one point Christina has her hair pulled back very severely.John Simm is engaging and is inclined to treat Christina Ricci the way she should be treated if she ever came to Leeds. John is also making his mark in the Life of Mars TV series.It's a romantic thriller and I'd guess the plot is not very original. It moves through some sordid aspects of modern life but doesn't wallow in them. John Hurt and Kyle McLachlan are suitably repellent.A good film too for fans of Green Wing.

Apart from 90 minutes of watching people smoke cigarettes, I don't really know what this movie tried to prove or say. The story is murky. The characters are ill defined. The cinematography is pretentious. The acting is (barely) adequate. I suppose swallowing a button like taking the eucharist might be considered profound by some. I thought it rather stupid and pointless. But if you like toe kissing and bare ass bonking, you may feel better about it. Channel 4 has done some interesting stuff. I suppose if you are going to pioneer and experiment, it's inevitable that you'll take a wrong turn now and then. Too bad this wrong turn led to a swamp. Too serious and too artsey dartsey by half!

"Miranda", misbilled as a romance/thriller (no thrills in this flick), is really a dark romantic comedy about an enigmatic woman, Miranda (Ricci), who beguiles a male librarian (Simm) with her haunting beauty and mysterious ways. Long on style and short on story, this film spends most of its time with the title character, of course, which Ricci plays well. The film crashes, however, on story as Miranda is really a pain in the a** and not something we, the audience, are inclined to wish on the more likeable Simm character. Meanwhile, bits and pieces of a story are doled out with the dots never really connected at the end making anything beyond the romantic quest little more than window dressing. Recommended for Ricci fans or dark comedy weirdos. (B-)