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100A 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.
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100On 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.
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100A 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.
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100Those 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.
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91It'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.
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90This is a dazzling movie, yet some people (not kids, but maybe their parents) will be put off by its Grand Guignol ghoulishness.
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88Like 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.
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88Depp deserves kudos for fashioning an original and outlandish if occasionally menacing character.
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88Bizarrely entertaining and brilliantly designed.
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80Here's a film about kids and for kids that has not lost touch with what it is like to actually be a kid.
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80Witty, 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.
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80Charlie 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.
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80The 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.
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80A perfect marriage of author and director.
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80I 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.
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80Tim Burton finally fulfills the promise of "Beetlejuice" with this imaginative masterpiece.
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78Depp’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."
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75Depp and Burton fly too high on the vapors of pure imagination. But it's hard to not get hooked on something this tasty.
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75Now 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.
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75If 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.
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75The 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.
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75Lovers of Dahl's book will almost certainly appreciate what Burton has wrought.
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75Burton's movie is not only more faithful, complex and better cast, it has an essential ingredient: squirrels.
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70Burton 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.
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70There'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.
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70Fun and nourishing, Charlie's the topsy-turvy equivalent of a three-course dinner in a single stick of gum.
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70Burton'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.
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70Entertaining 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.
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63It'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.
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63The 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.
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63Aesthetically wild and otherwise mild.
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63Burton'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.
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60Neo-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.
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60It turns out that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is half goofy-great, and half just a goof.
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60This 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.
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60It'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.
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60Dahl’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.
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50Its 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.
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50Inside 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.
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30The satirical edge has been dulled in a film that is dominated, and ultimately swamped, by its star's mannered, pixilated performance.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 130 out of 196
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Mixed: 12 out of 196
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Negative: 54 out of 196
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"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" adds up overwhelming creativity into the book based movie. The result is that the movie got drunk with chocolate.
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10
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7