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Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Generally favorable reviews
Based on 40 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 274 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Adventure | Comedy | Family/Kids | Fantasy
Written by:
John August
Roald Dahl (book)
Directed by: Tim Burton
Release Date:
Theatrical: July 15, 2005
DVD: November 8, 2005
Running Time: 115 minutes, Color
Origin: USA / UK
Summary
RATING: PG for quirky situations, action and mild language
Starring Johnny Depp, Freddie Highmore, David Kelly, Helena Bonham Carter, Noah Taylor, Missi Pyle, James Fox, Deep Roy, and Christopher Lee
Acclaimed director Tim Burton brings his vividly imaginative style to the beloved Roald Dahl classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, about eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka (Depp) and Charlie Bucket (Highmore), a good-hearted boy from a poor family who lives in the shadow of Wonka's extraordinary factory. (Warner Bros.)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Batman Beetlejuice Big Fish Ed Wood Edward Scissorhands Mars Attacks! Pee-wee's Big Adventure Planet of the Apes Sleepy Hollow Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street The Nightmare Before Christmas
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Those Oompa-Loompas are the beat, and soul, of Burton's finest movie since "Ed Wood": a madhouse kiddie musical with a sweet-and-sour heart.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
A peach of a story delightfully imagined by Dahl and lushly realized by Burton. It's full of witty or awesome scenes, flights of fancy and characters either totally, lovably sweet or outrageously, humorously rotten.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
A mischievously inventive, surreal entertainment, one that celebrates not only Whipple Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight and Nutty Crunch Surprise but Busby Berkeley, Stanley Kubrick, the Beatles, and the outer-space acting choices of one Johnny Depp - not to mention those bushy-tailed rodents in all their bustling splendor.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
On the screen, Burton turns out to BE the ideal filmmaker for this deliciously bizarre yarn. He's given free rein to his fantasies in past movies, but rarely as wittily and consistently as he does here.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
It's not orthodox Dahl but it's pure Burton, and, as it's been such a very long time since moviegoers have been afforded that particular treat, it's entirely welcome.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
This is a dazzling movie, yet some people (not kids, but maybe their parents) will be put off by its Grand Guignol ghoulishness.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
Depp deserves kudos for fashioning an original and outlandish if occasionally menacing character.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
Like Roald Dahl's book, Tim Burton's splendidly imaginative and visually stunning - and often very dark and creepy - new version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is squarely aimed more at children than their parents.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
Bizarrely entertaining and brilliantly designed.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Ella Taylor
The first half of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a brilliant blend of the best of Burton and Dahl, with some unexpected input from Charles Dickens. In the second half, the contraptions take over, drowning whatever story remains...But it falls frustratingly short of the masterpiece it might have been.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
Here's a film about kids and for kids that has not lost touch with what it is like to actually be a kid.
Read Full Review >Empire Olly Richards
Witty, wonderful and wildly imaginative, Burton’s first proper ‘family movie’ since "Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure" delivers a sugar rush that’ll last for days.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is absinthe in movie form, a white chocolate space egg of a picture that has a giddy hallucinatory quality in some places and an overcalculated glossiness in others. But for better or worse, it's fascinating.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
Tim Burton finally fulfills the promise of "Beetlejuice" with this imaginative masterpiece.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Dana Stevens
I call it wondrous because, in spite of lapses and imperfections, a few of them serious, Mr. Burton's movie succeeds in doing what far too few films aimed primarily at children even know how to attempt anymore, which is to feed - even to glut - the youthful appetite for aesthetic surprise.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
Depp’s performance aside, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is pure magic, swimming as it is in a black-treacle riptide of astonishing Oompa Loompa production numbers, an eerie patina of CGI airbrushing (Wonka himself looks downright pasteurized), and some almost too-clever in-jokes, and at least two references to Kurt Neumann’s 1958 film "The Fly."
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey
Burton's movie is not only more faithful, complex and better cast, it has an essential ingredient: squirrels.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Now this is strange. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory succeeds in spite of Johnny Depp's performance, which should have been the high point of the movie.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
If all the laughs come from Depp, who gives Willy the mannerisms of a classic Hollywood diva, the film's heart comes from Highmore, a gifted young performer who had a leading role in "Finding Neverland." His performance is sincere, deep and unforced in a way that's rare in a child actor.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
Lovers of Dahl's book will almost certainly appreciate what Burton has wrought.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Depp and Burton fly too high on the vapors of pure imagination. But it's hard to not get hooked on something this tasty.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
The movie's overlong and there are lumps in the batter, but this is a ''Charlie" that the author would recognize as upholding his playfully dyspeptic tradition.
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
Entertaining and fabulously imaginative in many ways, this second bigscreen rendition of the late author's modest morality tale on the wages of unbridled excess sports excesses of its own.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
There's little wrong with Charlie, but it needs the Burton of old to animate its candy-colored universe with mischief and awe. Instead, he remains trapped like Wonka in a hermetic house of wonders, and the movie suffocates along with him.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Ed Park
Fun and nourishing, Charlie's the topsy-turvy equivalent of a three-course dinner in a single stick of gum.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Burton's gifts ensure you won't be able to take your eyes off the screen, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll be happy with what you're seeing.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar
Burton fans and those eager for a more accurate adaptation of the novel will be happy with this new movie, while nostalgia-addled Gen X-ers and stoners of all ages will always have the original.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
Burton's movie is more like Chris Columbus' first Harry Potter movie. Nearly everything that's supposed to be magical falls flat; nearly everything that's supposed to be mundane is magical.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jami Bernard
The eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp) can't feel pleasure, even though he's surrounded by it, so it's weirdly appropriate that the movie isn't "fun," even if it's amazing to look at.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
It's Depp's misfire that keeps the picture from becoming a genuinely sweet pleasure: As it stands, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the equivalent of NutriSweet.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
It's doubtful that Depp's off-kilter interpretation will have any discernible effect on the movie's success. But it remains the movie's most disappointing aspect.
Read Full Review >Time Richard Schickel
This is rather a thin tale, not much thickened by Burton's direction or Depp's playing. There's a distance, a detachment to this film. It lacks passion.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
Neo-Gothic fantasist Tim Burton and writer John August (Big Fish) play it strictly by the book for this darker but far more faithful adaptation of Roald Dahl's cautionary 1964 young-adult novel.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine Ken Tucker
It turns out that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is half goofy-great, and half just a goof.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
Dahl’s story was never intended to be anything other than a sticky-fingered feast, whereas the movie flits through pedophobic creepiness and ends up as a slightly costive parable of family values.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Inside the mysterious factory, a psychedelic realm where Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka holds sway, pleasure gradually gives way to a peculiar state that I can only describe as engagement without enjoyment.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
Its heart is in the right place and it resists the temptation to junk up the story, but Depp does nothing with his character and the movie has little of the unique wit or panache that would make it appealing to an older-than-10 audience.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Ann Hornaday
The satirical edge has been dulled in a film that is dominated, and ultimately swamped, by its star's mannered, pixilated performance.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.6 (out of 10) based on 274 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
joe gave it a0:
Just awful. Depp was the worst he's ever been. It was very hard to sit through the whole thing. Don't watch it.
Gina L. gave it an8:
I thought that this movie was okay. it wasnt GREAT. but it wasnt HORRIBLE. it was OKAY. the book has great detail, but the movie skipped many many parts.
Missy A. gave it a10:
This movie was great, funny and entertaining. I love the BOOK "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" since I was young. I've watched the "Willy Wonka" movie a million times and I always thought something was missing...Now, finally Tim Burton has done the BOOK justice. I think most people need to relax. People are going crazy because they think it is a remake when in fact it is a re-adaption of the BOOK. Tim captured the true spirit of Roald Dahl's genius. And Depp did a wonderful job in capturing the true spirit of Willy Wonka from the BOOK.
Jack B. gave it a0:
A shocking and unnecessary remake. What a complete and utter piece of tripe. Tim Burton and Johnny Depp should be ashamed of themselves.
[Anonymous] gave it an8:
I will have to say this. It has those parts that were quirky. But unlike Edward Scissorhands, these were acceptable. Johnny Depp was incredible. Freddie Highmore is one of my favorite child actors, though he says "It's great" too much.
Jess gave it an8:
how many of you know that when Roald Dahl saw Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory before it was released literally walked out and called it a piece of trash??? I researched it because I too was a fan of the movie, and after reading the book totally understood why. This is one of the reasons why I love Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Mr. Bucket gets to LIVE in this one!! The oompa loompa songs actually have Mr. Dahl's lyrics in them(I love Mike TeeVee's song!)!! Willy Wonka was described as looking like a little devil...Johnny wasn't given the pointy beard, but he did his acting how he though ROALD would like it! I also love how they included the castle made of chocolate, that was my favorite Grampa Joe story. For those of you talking about how much Johnny sounded more like Michael Jackson, I will agree...he does, but as I told my mother, there is a difference: Wonka doesn't LIKE children, where as Mr. Jackson...well, you know. I give this movie an 8 because there are some stupid flashbacks thrown into the mix and it seemed too short, but all in all it's a GREAT movie, and the kids(they were kinda scared of "the girl turning into a blue berry") and adults I know love it as well.
Richard C gave it a0:
Worst movie ever!!! First off Depp's acting sucked and I mean truly sucked. It was almost like watching a grown man imitate a little boy, but in a perverted way. This is a remake of Willy Wonka, if not it would have been named something else like Willy Wonka 2 or something. Plus you can not beat the original movie, because the performances were classic and subtle. Please Please do not waste your time watching this garbage. I would say it is worst then Epic Movie. Those of you who thought it is cute, it is not. The only good thing about this movie is the scenery and special effects. Please don't encourage these Hollywood idiots to remake these movies, instead let's try to make something original that is good. Original pieces are almost always better then remakes.
