Alice In Wonderland Opens today at Quality 16, Showcase, Brighton Review by Jeff Meyers of the Metro Times Grade: B

As an exercise in delightfully deranged, comically monstrous visuals, Tim Burton’s "Alice in Wonderland" is everything you hoped it would be. Plants with human faces, checkerboard landscapes, forced perspective, day-glo colors and macabre pranks abound in his recasting of Lewis Carroll’s classic as a warped tale of Victorian-age feminist empowerment. There are scads of freakishly lovely and meticulously rendered 3-D images, yet his hyperactive Alice lacks depth and, more tragically, wonder.

It’s been 13 years since Alice ("In Treatment"’s Mia Wasikowska) fell down the rabbit hole, and her memories of Wonderland have faded into dreams. But now, on the day she’s expected to be engaged to an insufferably priggish lord, she finds herself tumbling back into the realm of the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), Blue Caterpillar (voiced by Alan Rickman) and Cheshire Cat (voiced by Stephen Fry). It seems war is afoot in "Underland," where the hydrocephalic-headed, decapitation-happy Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) sics her Bandersnatch, Jabberwocky (voiced by Christopher Lee), and Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover), on anyone allied with her pacifist (and far prettier) sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway).

Burton restrains his more indulgent instincts yet manages to deliver deliriously inspired visuals and inventive camerawork. Unfortunately, Alice feels emotionally detached and, at times, rushed.

Read the full review here