Wonderland: Critic Reviews

The high quality of most of the acting makes this otherwise pointless and indulgent movie at least watchable.

The Holmes story has fared better in a pair of documentaries.

A film whose effects are as hard to wash away as blood.

Overblown, overheated, overdirected, overacted, overlong and over here, in the local bijoux.

Wonderland skips lightly along the sewers of human depravity as if the trip alone was worth the telling.

Jonesing for headlines and gossip-buzz, Wonderland is too look-Ma for its own good.

The murders themselves, apparently revenge for the robbery of a high-roller, were indeed messy. But they don't hold a candle to the disarray that is director and co-writer James Cox's film.

Muddled and largely unentertaining.

Wonderland is in your face. Any deeper connections, like those to heart and mind, get lost in the splash.

For all Wonderland's kinetic energy, the mind wanders.

True crime procedurals can have a certain fascination, but not when they're jumbled glimpses of what might or might not have happened involving a lot of empty people whose main claim to fame is that they're dead.

Wonderland is fast and frenetic and so unvarnished that it can make you feel unclean watching it.

Although Wonderland isn't much of a movie, it is a parade of exceptional acting.

Wonderland aspires to the grisly poetry of a James Ellroy novella but only achieves the ugliness of an 8-mm loop.

Wonderland may not be the feel-good movie of the year; in fact it feels pretty lousy most of the time. But it offers a dark story well-told with some truly fine performances.

A dry, forensic account, more suitable for a true-crime show on late-night cable.

With its mannered, hyped-up style, James Cox's second feature has absolutely nothing to say about its characters and their lamentable actions.

Feverish and unfocused.

Sometimes Wonderland does make you wonder why you're wasting your time with these losers. But there's also a lot here that stays with you.

Rarely has so much of so little consequence been so closely examined.

The main interest here is the acting, which is, by turns, entertaining or just entertainingly bad, with lots of grungy seriousness and Method-trained twitching, but also some moments of real gusto.

A compelling journey into the depths of hell on earth.

Some worthy performances aside, this helter-skelter portrait of John Holmes and the Wonderland murders is far from wonderful.

... character gets sacrificed for just another true-crime drama.

Although it has a delectable cast, Wonderland skims over its seedy characters to glamorize drug addiction and the role porn star John C. Holmes had in four murders.