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90A fantastical romp that proves every bit as transporting as that movie about the blue people of Pandora, his "Alice" is more than just a gorgeous 3D sight to behold.
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90Tim Burton, plus Alice, plus 3D equals an unforgettable, one-of-a-kind movie experience. It will clean up.
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88When it comes to 3-D visual splendors, give me Wonderland over Pandora any day.
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80Carroll purists and freshman English majors may be aghast at the change in story, but for those who watched "Avatar" and marveled at the images but were left wanting by the wooden acting and tired story, "Alice" is a treat.
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80If you can get past the craven concessions to formula, though, it’s rather underful--I mean, wonderful. Taking his cues from John Tenniel’s famous illustrations, Burton indulges his delight in disproportion.
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75"Alice" plays better as an adult hallucination, which is how Burton rather brilliantly interprets it until a pointless third act flies off the rails.
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75The movie won't be for everyone -- it's a little rough for preteens, and it doesn't throw many laughs the audience's way -- but along with "Sweeney Todd," this is Burton's most interesting project in a decade
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75If there were truth-in-titling, Burton's movie rightly would be called "Alice in Narnia: With Stops at Disneyland, the Shire, Rohan, Naboo, and Oz."
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75Burton finely balances excess and restraint to create an absorbing, visually rich world of his very own.
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75The movie carries a mild PG rating but may be too intense for younger children.
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75This is still her (Wasikowska’s) picture. She’s its 10-foot tower, mysterious and brave and excited and withdrawn. Alice is the true magic in a Wonderland that’s mere movie magic – the happy surprise amidst everything we’ve come to expect.
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75Wonderland is equal parts Lewis Carroll and Grace Slick. It’s inspired by Carroll’s "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass," but also, apparently, by Slick’s psychedelic ‘60s anthem, “White Rabbit.” It’s a trip, man.
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75Burton's most imaginative film in some time.
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67A strangely passive film, dutifully ladling out its bits of filmic wizardry and expanding Lewis Carroll’s fantastical mythos in a promising new direction without any palpable sense of glee or verve.
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63Still, even Disney and a PG rating can't bury Burton's subversive wit. Like Carroll, he's a master at dressing up psychic wounds in fantasy.
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63Alice in Wonderland is curiously devoid of metaphors and allegories about a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, about to be engaged by arrangement to a loathsome toad of a man she can barely stomach. The lack of psychological subtext is hugely disappointing.
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63Depp's nonsense-spouting Mad Hatter, decked out in a red fright wig and possibly more makeup than Michael Jackson, is an unlikely resistance leader.
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63The film is always fun, but as Carroll might have observed, it’s not much of a muchness.
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60It tends to get lost in its own delirium, which will enchant some and drive others bonkers.
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60Sadly Lewis lite and not without flaws but this is as Burtonesque as one could wish for, a real treat for fans of his twisted imagination and great British character actors.
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58The best adaptations have found ways to put a personal stamp on the familiar stories. Others have simply reproduced an Alice facsimile in the image of their own era. Surprisingly, Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland belongs to the latter camp. That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad movie, just another frustratingly impersonal one from a director who once had trouble compacting his personality down to movie size.
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58The movie is a decidedly mixed bag, in part, because of the equally pronounced disparities between Burton and Carroll – and between Burton and Disney, for that matter.
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50Where Burton and his screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, go astray is turning this new 3-D version - a sequel, really, about a grown Alice returning to the psychic dreamworld of her childhood - into a fantasy adventure that looks like every other CGI epic out there.
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50Here's a riddle: What's Alice in Wonderland without wonder? It's a beloved character landing in the rubble of wrong-headed revisionism.
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50In the film's rather humdrum 3-D, the place doesn't dazzle — it droops.
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50In the end, Alice in Wonderland comes off as manufactured instead of dreamy. Burton delivers all the wonder money can buy; what's missing is the wonder it can't.
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50For all its clever design, beguiling creatures and witty actors, the picture feels far more conventional than it should; it's a Disney film illustrated by Burton, rather than a Burton film that happens to be released by Disney.
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50As usual with Burton, the visuals are much better than the story, and Carroll’s characters are richly realized--especially Tweedledum and Tweedledee, poster children for juvenile obesity, and the raving Red Queen, played with razor-sharp timing by Helena Bonham Carter.
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40Unlike Carroll’s perversely idealized protagonist, Burton’s Alice is just another anachronistic feminist tearing down Victorian patriarchal norms. Even her—[shudder]—Avril Lavigne–blared theme song is a skin-deep grrrl-power accessory.
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40The first act is very nearly unbearable, leaden and doomy and generically plotted.
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40Like more than one recent movie, Alice seems a trailer for a Wonderland computer game--and it is. The final battle is clearly designed for gaming. So, it would seem, is the character of actualized as well as action Alice.
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40It has its successful moments but it's surprisingly inert overall, more like a Burton derivative than something he actually did himself.
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40Busy, garish and periodically amusing.
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40The most surprising thing about Alice in Wonderland is its general lack of surprise.
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30A film adaptation should, of course, treat its source material as inspiration rather than dogma. But did Burton have to get the books so ENTIRELY wrong?
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Its single biggest failing - an affront to Lewis Carroll and the charms of nonsense literature - is that it makes sense.
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25A charmless, vandalized version of a classic.
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It might be time for Johnny Depp and Tim Burton to start thinking about seeing other people. Alice in Wonderland, their seventh film together, is so thoroughly soul-deadening and laborious that the prospect of an eighth collaboration feels like the sword of Damocles.