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 …
Is it another I Married a Monster from Outer Space, or is it only the paranoia of an expectant mother? The movie is too slow and ponderous for the one, and too hoked-up for the other, but it has a nice big fat role for Charlize Theron, who takes it …
Julian Schnabel's second film is, like his Basquiat, a conventional, celebratory biopic on an unconventional, subcultural hero: this time the homosexual Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas. We take up his story in his female-dominated childhood (the boy lays his head against a tree trunk, stroking it, gazing at a group of …
Intolerably twee romance that fudges the border between madness and daffiness. A clinical nutcase (breakfast of milk, peanut butter, Cap'n Crunch in the blender) "wins" a semiliterate, Chaplin-and-Keaton-emulating clown during a poker game, and discovers in him a true soulmate (cheese sandwiches grilled by clothes iron, potatoes mashed by tennis …
Johnny Depp disappears into the role of real-life gangster Whitey Bulger — receding hairline and icy blue eyes abetted by vocal fry and a sour sneer compounded from equal parts rodent and snake. But the real story here is FBI agent John Connolly (a beefy Joel Edgerton), who gets the …
The biography of George Jung (don't beat yourself up if you've never heard of him) is just another boring drug story: the easy, breezy path of a working-class Massachusetts white boy, not to mention montage-happy and goldie-oldies-strewn path, to $60 million as a cocaine entrepreneur, and then his swift and …
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 …
Another art-house food film: an agnostic chocolate-maker opens her Little Shop of Temptations during the Lenten fast. Director Lasse Hallstrom follows his discreet pro-choice propaganda (The Cider House Rules) with a smug, complacent, liberal-minded broadside against the smugness, complacency, and narrow-mindedness of a French-Catholic provincial village circa 1959. The motley …
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 …
Not even the thirstiest of Western fans could work up much enthusiasm over the news that Jim Jarmusch, of all people, had made one. And the emerging manhunt for a greenhorn named William Blake (Johnny Depp in wire-rim specs, plaid suit, bow tie) produces nothing to accelerate the heartbeat: the …
Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet narrate this journey into the depths...of the sea.
A flat glass of bubbly in which Brando, with dyed yellow hair and an out-of-puff delivery, plays psychiatrist to a young fantasist (the drowsy Johnny Depp) who may not be the real Don Juan, may not have made love to over a thousand women by the age of twenty-one, but …
Inside the Mafia, on the elbow of an FBI infiltrator. And all of a sudden Lefty from Mulberry Street won't go anywhere without Don the Jeweller. The factual basis adds little in the way of interest or excitement, although it seems to inspire a desire to instruct (mustaches are "against …
A synthetic man (Johnny Depp) has been left unfinished by his creator: twelve-inch blades in place of fingers, and hence a bit of a punk-rocker's look, with an untended tangle of black hair and some fashionable self-mutilation over the face. This — the imperfection of creation and the danger thereof …