Tim Burton’s adaptation of the Lewis Carroll classic gives him license, free rein, greased rails, to stage a congenial freak show in a hermetic netherworld: a 3-D moving-picture book. The customary merger of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass, has the innovation of a marriageable …
Big bore. Tim Burton, to inhibit erosion of his "fan base," needed to bounce back in a big way from the commercial conservatism of Planet of the Apes, and in Daniel Wallace's slender novel he has found a fund of peculiarity: the sententious and sentimental memoirs of an Alabama fabulist, …
Tim Burton's consolation prize for losing out on the Lemony Snicket concession (surely that had his name written on it) is a remake of the fractured fairy tale by Roald Dahl, a spindly little framework freighted with production values, CG imagery, and dark dense bordello color, like some scrawny four-foot …
Disney's live-action version of the Grimm fairy tale about humble endurance and the joys of ball-going isn't perfect. (For one thing, Helena Bonham Carter's Fairy Godmother is slapsticky and silly in a way befitting wicked stepsisters and no one else. For another, some of the personal and political machinations are …
Tim Burton’s tiresome tribute to the TV goth soaper, with Johnny Depp fully committed as the heavily made-up vampire Barnabas. Their devotion is real, but the film is a rummage of poor gags and plot fragments that add up to little. It has campy design touches, corny creep-outs, vivid women …
Director David Fincher, loaded with don't-try-this-at-home ideas on how to prove yourself a man and not a mouse, traces a course of anti-Establishment insurgency, from small acts of personal liberation (peeing in the lobster bisque, splicing a frame of male genitals into the middle of a kiddie film) to organizing …
Odd choice of project for Randal Kleiser (Grease, Blue Lagoon, Big Top Pee-Wee), an adaptation of a very adult, very British novel about a heterosexual hairdresser still a virgin at thirty-one (and with nothing really "wrong" with him). The novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard, has been allowed to write the script …
Charles Dickens' cracking yarn about an orphan who becomes a gentleman through the workings of an anonymous benefactor gets a new treatment from Mike Newell, whose remarkably varied filmography includes a Harry Potter film (The Goblet of Fire), a video-game adaptation (Prince of Persia), and a couple of famous Brit …
Director James Ivory's -- and producer Ismail Merchant's -- and scriptwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's -- third try at E.M. Forster, after their Room with a View and their Maurice. The third time's the charm. The diminished satirical element as compared, say, to Room with a View, and diminished comical element, …
As masters of speech, British actors stutter superbly (think of Derek Jacobi in I, Claudius). This lovably intricate, humane film from Tom Hooper and writer David Seidler dramatizes how the unexpected king, George VI, overcame his handicap in uneasy 1936. There is wonderful acting rapport between Colin Firth’s stiff, shy, …
Sincere story of answered prayers, mostly those of one Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), an ex-con who tastes mercy and tries to break free from his criminal past (he stole a loaf of bread). But the reformed man is pursued by Javert (Russell Crowe), a lawman who does not believe reform …
Director Kenneth Branagh -- not Mary Shelley -- has obviously done some dutiful research on the Romantic Era from which the original novel sprang. (Correct full title: Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus.) And the products of these researches have armed him with an excuse for any old expressive excess, and …
Light diversion from Woody Allen. The topic of adoption might momentarily quicken the pulses of critics of a biographical-psychological bent. (Mia Farrow reference. ) But the movie doesn't really hit its stride till it ventures outside the family nucleus, as the distinctly unathletic New York sportswriter (Allen), fretting about the …
Run-of-the-mill black comedy (remember when there wasn't a black-comedy mill? when black comedy was a mark of individuality?) about a dentist whose well-ordered existence is disrupted by high-risk sex, illicit drug traffic, and murder. Steve Martin cannot help but lighten it with a tone of just-kidding. And an uncredited Kevin …
Same dross, different gender. Danny Ocean’s kid sister Debbie (Sandra Bullock) whiles away a five-year stretch in the pokey by conspiring to knock over the annual Met Gala. Her seven same-sex associates are all assigned one function/trait needed to advance the plot: Rihanna as the spliff-rolling hacker (with the floating …