Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events: Critic Reviews

Olaf is a threat to the children, one who just won't go away; Carrey's biggest threat is that he'll never stop clowning around.

A Series of Unfortunate Events suffers from one of the most grievous maladies that can strike a children's film, notably a regrettable tendency to fill in all the quiet with noise.

Though the movie is a literate adventure story, the series' dark tone is lightened up in the film just enough to make one yearn for the darkly twisted witticisms and pervasive anxiety that made Handler's books uniquely appealing.

The visuals are dark and ominous without getting totally terrifying -- the characters feel real, but their environment is off-kilter enough to remind you that this world is one of imagination.

I daresay most viewers will enjoy themselves. I already look forward to the next one.

The movie, like the books, flatters children's innate sense that the world is not a perfect place and that anyone who insists otherwise is trying to sell you something.

Against all odds it delights, using a compact script (by Robert Gordon), creative storytelling and the ripe comedic talents of a prodigious cast to transform written word into a near-perfect cinematic entity.

The imaginatively cast, gorgeously designed movie has moments of wry wit and oddball charm. But its lumpish plot reinforces the suspicion that solid storytelling is no longer a Hollywood priority.

The movie is crammed with Tim Burton-style desolation, foreboding and technological anachronism.

I think this one is a tune-up for the series, a trial run in which they figure out what works and what needs to be tweaked.

Exceptionally clever, hilariously gloomy and bitingly subversive.

No praise is too high for cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who leeches the color out of Rick Heinrichs' spectacular sets so that the film looks like a lost masterpiece of German expressionism or a cherished nightmare of Tim Burton.

Helping mitigate the fear factor is the movie's smart-alecky attitude.

[It] may be the best live-action children's film of the year, a woven series of dark fairy tales that are witty and inventive enough for all ages.

Carrey has proven that when he's on, he's more creative than anyone out there. And he's on as Count Olaf, Snicket's principle villain

As with the first two Harry Potter entries, A Series of Unfortunate Events ultimately feels like the triumph of literal-mindedness over lyricism. It also has a hollow emotional core.

A lavishly mounted blockbuster that has little personality of its own except on a purely visual level.

There's little, very little, at all unfortunate about it.

A dark charmer.

A more apt title might have been: Jim Carrey's Series of Outlandish Impersonations.

As it ticks by, laboriously, it leaves you feeling that you should be enjoying it more than you are.

Heinrichs helps take your mind off the slack direction and the letdown of a climax, which ought to make the kiddies hurl Gummi Bears at the screen.

Passable Hollywood entertainment.

Demonstrates what happens when you take a clever idea and run it into the ground.

What the movie lacks, alarmingly, is a shriveled black heart, or a big, red tell-tale one pulsing beneath the floorboards.