Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Critic Reviews

A madhouse kiddie musical with a sweet-and-sour heart.

Wondrous and flawed.

The summer's most visually arresting escapist adventure.

Throughout his fey, simpering performance, Depp seems to be straining so hard for weirdness that the entire enterprise begins to feel like those excruciating occasions when your parents tried to be hip.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a spectacle to be enjoyed, but only as such.

The movie weighs a ton, as expensive Hollywood kitsch usually does, and it's to Burton and Depp's credit that it doesn't completely buckle under its own mass.

Fun and nourishing, Charlie's the topsy-turvy equivalent of a three-course dinner in a single stick of gum.

A movie that will delight children, annoy fans of the 1971 version that starred a slyly subversive Gene Wilder and perplex everyone else.

The production is top shelf.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is not a total triumph. But it's successful enough to linger in your memory, for the most part pleasantly.

Is it sweet? Sure. But Charlie is so much richer than that.

As the star who's framed in the center of nearly every shot he's in, Depp is a constantly surprising Willy Wonka.

You can't help feeling that a fantasist as accomplished as Burton can manage this kind of project with his eyes shut. The trouble is that, from film to film, his dreams are starting to look the same.

The kids, their adventures and the song and dance numbers are so entertaining that Depp's strange Willy Wonka is not fatal to the movie, although it's at right angles to it.

An exhilarating and fanciful movie that never drowns in money or technology.

Much more faithful [to the source material].

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.

There's not a lot of substance to the kid-flick fantasy, but it does an exquisite job of transporting the viewers -- along with the protagonists -- to a gloriously magical setting.

Burton has included a far more satisfying ending.

A great piece of entertainment.

I wonder if even children will respond to the peculiarly humorless and charmless stylistic eccentricities of Mr. Burton and his star, Johnny Depp.

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.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is an inspired and hugely satisfying meeting of director and material.

A glorious pageant of wit and whimsy, and a new milestone in childhood moviegoing.