Tear-jerkers about lovable dogs are almost always boxoffice winners as "Marley & Me" proved last year. Lasse Hallstrom's "Hachiko: A Dog's Story" might not match that film's performance, but it seems certain to win an appreciative family audience. At the Seattle International Film Festival, where the film recently received its North American premiere, sounds of sniffling permeated the large auditorium. The movie is no masterpiece, but it delivers.

Stephen P. Lindsey's screenplay is adapted from a Japanese film made 20 years ago, which itself was based on the well-known story from the 1930s about an Akita that came to the train station in Tokyo to wait for his master every day for 10 years after the man died. Lindsey changed the setting to Rhode Island and updated the story but retained the basic idea of a loyal Akita who achieves an almost-transcendental bond with his owner, a music professor played by Richard Gere.

Gere was one of the producers of the film, and it's possible that his interest in Eastern philosophy gave him a strong connection to the story, which begins when he discovers an Akita puppy that has been abandoned at the train station where he commutes to work. He brings the dog home on a temporary basis, but it isn't long before Hachi becomes a permanent member of his household. His wife, elegantly played by Joan Allen, objects at first to the dog's presence but is quickly won over. Characterizations are fairly perfunctory, so it helps that Gere and Allen bring conviction and dignity to their portrayals. Hallstrom does a good job creating a sense of community. The townspeople all chip in to look after Hachi while he performs his daily ritual.

Those who know the legend will realize where the story is heading, but it plays out effectively because Hallstrom handles the tear-jerking moments discreetly. The score by Jan A.P. Kaczmarek, an Oscar winner for "Finding Neverland," enhances the poignancy. The locale is skillfully rendered, and Hachi, played by three dogs as an adult and about 20 as a puppy, has definite star presence. The final moments of the film are absolutely devastating. Kids will love the movie, and their parents might be equally enchanted.

By Stephen Farber

"I Love You Phillip Morris" doesn't have anything to do with smoking, but that's about the only thing it's not connected to. It's of the ethereal-absurdist-gay-romantic-biographical farce genre, which begs the question: "How are you going to market this?" Basically, just say Jim Carrey struts his stuff in this engaging oddity.

Carrey is at his nimble best as Steve, a Texas family man and lawman who bolts out of the closet into a life of, well, everything. He makes up for his lost years of a straight-arrow, heterosexual life by plunging headfirst into multiple lives of con man and lover. Based on a real-life character, Steve was abandoned at birth, and in the film's glib psychology, he's undertaking to find his real identity.

A charmer and a rascal, Steve enthusiastically embraces the high-gay lifestyle: vacationing, accessorizing, spending, dining, prowling. And he gets a first boyfriend, who is expensive. Like certain smitten males whose mate's tastes outdistance their pocketbooks, Steve jumps headlong into the foolhardy -- he embraces embezzlement, fraud and all sorts of chicanery to maintain his Rolodex ways.

This fast life leads to the pokey, where he falls for a delicate fellow con, Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor). They truly spark, and complement each other. In jail and out, the twosome attempt a conventional romantic relationship. Steve is the breadwinner, while Phillip holds down the hearth. True to his wild nature, Steve can't contain himself. He reverts to his con man ways.

It's in these naughty parts where this inventive escapade shines: Carrey's chameleonlike gyrations and falsifications are deliciously funny. His comedic versatility and impersonations are amazing, but it's in his character's darkest recesses that he's truly powerful. As the steadfast Phillip, McGregor is sympathetic and vulnerable. His heart is always ready to be broken.

Like Carrey's character, the story and style are also all over the place, rendering it somewhat inaccessible. Admittedly, the whole film is in a bit of an aesthetic dither, which will confound many viewers. Still, filmmakers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa have concocted a frothy and misty amusement.

"Phillip Morris' " spry storytelling is wonderfully accessorized by production designer Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski's stylish furnishings and costume designer David C. Robinson's vivid fashions.

By Duane Byrge

Martin Scorsese reportedly received the script for his new film Shutter Island while recording narration for a documentary on Val Lewton, the great producer of low-budget 1940s RKO horror films that generated suspense through the power of suggestion. Laeta Kalogridis’ adaptation of the Dennis Lehane novel surely appealed to Scorsese’s love of Lewton, with its similarly eerie setting on an isolated, forbidding prison island harboring dark mysteries. The resulting movie is gorgeously crafted, as one would expect from the masterly Scorsese, but any one of Lewton’s films delivered double the chills at half the running time and a fraction of the budget.

Shutter Island was a departure for author Lehane, known for the Boston-based crime novels Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone, each made into a successful film. It’s a Gothic-style psychological thriller set in 1954 and centered on a U.S. marshal, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), investigating the disappearance of a murderess from the high-security, island fortress of the Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, accessible only by ferry from Boston. Despite the solicitous manner of Ashecliffe overseer Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), Teddy and his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) are still treated largely like intruders, leading them to suspect dark doings at the institution.

Teddy has his own demons—horrible memories of the piles of corpses he encountered at the Dachau concentration camp as a World War II soldier, then the death of his beloved wife (Michelle Williams) in a fire set by an arsonist. In fact, one of the reasons Teddy is at Ashecliffe is to track down that same arsonist, whom he believes is housed in the dreaded “Ward C.” As a hurricane buffets the island and strands him, Teddy becomes convinced that the hospital has links to the Nazis and Cold War experiments and his investigation turns increasingly perilous.

There are many more plot twists ahead, but already you can get a sense of how overcooked the narrative is. This stew of ’50s paranoia, medical mayhem and historical hysteria ultimately comes to a full boil and delivers some much-craved answers, but for a long stretch you sit there wondering if all the breakneck melodrama is going to make any sense (kind of like the current season of “Lost”). Oh, for the efficiency of a 70-minute Lewton movie like The 7th Victim.

With his residual baby face, DiCaprio looks like he’s play-acting in his ’50s trench-coat and fedora, which may even be the intention. But he remains an admirably committed (forgive the pun) actor, fully up to the intense demands of the material. Kingsley is smoothly insinuating as the possibly deceptive doctor in charge, Ruffalo makes an appealing sidekick, and Patricia Clarkson, Emily Mortimer, Robin Bartlett and the great Max von Sydow offer stellar cameos.

As you’d expect with Scorsese, technical contributions across the board are top-notch, from Robert Richardson’s dynamic cinematography to Dante Ferretti’s highly atmospheric production design to Thelma Schoonmaker’s dependably sharp editing. Unusual for Scorsese, the effective music score, supervised by Robbie Robertson, consists of often discordant passages from modern composers like Krzysztof Penderecki, Morton Feldman and John Adams. And Shutter Island itself, the spectacular Peddocks Island near Boston, deserves star billing too.

By Kevin Lally

Revolving around an investigative reporter and his unlikely crime-solving partner, Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson's posthumous Millennium trilogy of novels were not so much best-sellers as international publishing phenomena. The film adaptation of the first book, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," is, like its source material, at once formula thriller, scathing social commentary and dark history lesson. But it's also a more eloquent work; smartly condensing the novel's sprawl, the feature forgoes prosaic detail for cinematic vigor. The result is a character-driven mystery of considerable emotional power, often harrowing and always compelling.

The film broke boxoffice records in Scandinavia, where it opened a year ago and where the two subsequent movies in the series already have been released. Stateside, the Music Box-distributed "Tattoo," which opens March 19, will attract not only fans of the book but art house patrons drawn by strong reviews.

For all his insight on finance and politics, muckraker Larsson's most indelible creation is the title character, a 24-year-old goth fury named Lisbeth Salander, who has a genius for computer hacking and no interest in -- or capacity for -- quotidian niceties. In a stunning performance, Noomi Rapace fully inhabits the role, making Lisbeth's sullen and righteous anger evident in her every glance (she's a woman of few words). The nose-ringed beauty is fascinating because she's far more than the sum of her troubled past, which is divulged gradually. She's one of the story's two truth-seekers, intent on exposing abuses of power; the other is financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist). Other than digitally, their paths don't cross until more than an hour into the film.

As the story opens, Mikael has been convicted of libeling a corporate chieftain, and Lisbeth has been surveiling him for a client in her capacity as a researcher. He discovers that she's tapping into his laptop and enlists her help in solving a 40-year-old murder. Their investigation takes place in the atmospheric northern chill of Hedeby Island, where Mikael has accepted a lucrative job to fill the months before he begins his jail sentence. Octogenarian industrialist Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), patriarch of a family he despises, wants a last shot at uncovering who among his relatives killed his beloved niece Harriet, a teen who disappeared from the island at a family gathering four decades earlier.

A who's who of the Vanger clan, replete with alcoholics, indifferent parents and card-carrying Nazis, is at first a staggering pileup of information, but screenwriters Rasmus Heisterberg and Nikolaj Arcel and director Niels Arden Oplev ("Portland") turn the exposition into a life force -- from the Internet to hidden cameras, technology is a character in its own right.

Digging into the archives of the local newspaper, Mikael finds grainy images of 16-year-old Harriet on the day of her disappearance. Computer software enables him to animate the snapshots, and the result is a haunting update of Antonioni's photographic mystery in "Blow-Up" (a film released the same year as the fictional Harriet's disappearance). Manipulation of photos gives way to evidence: Across a 1966 summer crowd, Harriet seems to be facing her murderer.

Monsters walk among us, and their crimes are extreme in this bleak yet not-quite-hopeless story, whose Swedish title's literal translation is "Men Who Hate Women." Lisbeth, clearly no stranger to abuse, never is merely a victim. When she turns the tables on the latest monster (Peter Andersson) in her life, there's no real sense of triumph. The film refuses to pawn off false notions of redemption.

It isn't, however, above the hoariest of whodunit conventions (the killer takes ample time to explain his crimes to his next target). Although it sometimes stretches credulity, the lengthy film doesn't feel overlong. Fine performances, especially Rapace's, ignite this cold case, and the clean widescreen cinematography never betrays the project's small-screen origins.

By Sheri Linden

Horror movie subjects, like celebrity deaths and buses, come in threes. Thus, trailing behind the latest, recycled rash of 'bad seed' pictures The Unborn and Orphan, like some sulky teenager on a family holiday, comes the Renee Zellweger-starring Case 39 - another apparent anti-adoption screed, from the director of Pandorum. Clearly, Philip Larkin got it back to front, and Cyril Connolly was onto something: they screw you up, kids, especially other people's kids, while that pram in the hall almost certainly contains 57 varieties of pain. And little girls, of course, are absolutely terrifying. That's why Stanley Kubrick used not one but two of them in The Shining.

The latest threat to homeland security is sad-eyed moppet Lillith Sullivan (Jodelle Ferland). Despite whimpering that her hollow-eyed, crucifix-clasping parents "talk about sending me to Hell", Lillith's lank black hair is scraped back and tucked behind her ears, which everyone knows is movie shorthand for 'sneaky 'n' weird'. She also tilts her head sideways when she speaks, which even brain-damaged pitbulls dimly appreciate is the internationally-recognised symbol for 'run, run like the wind'. Now you mention it, she also shares a name with Frasier Crane's ex-wife, in turn named after a Hebrew storm demon associated with death, darkness and vengeance. All of which is lost on lentils-for-brains social worker Emily Jenkins (Renee Zellweger), who hauls her out of the kitchen oven after her folks attempt to bake her alive.

In a move even the filmmakers realise stretches credibility to twanging point, Emily temporarily adopts Lillith while she waits to be re-housed with foster parents who won't mistake her for a birthday cake. Unfortunately for Emily, what Lillith wants, Lillith gets. And what she really wants right now is an ice cream. Not just today, every day. See, this witchy cuckoo also possesses the ability to make people see and experience their own worst fears. So you'd better hurry up with that 99 Flake.

Before the first hour's up, Em's other cases and colleagues are slaughtering their slumbering parents with a tyre iron or being pestered to death by a plague of CGI hornets, vomited out of their every orifice. Meanwhile Em's barricading herself in her bedroom every night and attempting to burn her own house down, with the satanic little charge inside. "A damaged, deceitful, manipulative child is not a demon," insists grizzled, perma-tanned detective Mike Barron (Ian McShane). But can Emily convince her Barron knight that Lillith has got the very devil in her?

By Ali Catterall

Nonfiction cinema or provocation? Art or prank? Questions of authorship, authenticity and credibility cleave through "Exit Through the Gift Shop," a nearly unclassifiable hybrid documentary film by international "street artist" phenom Banksy. Originally identified as "Spotlight Surprise" in the film listings, Sundance programmers only revealed the title a few days before its Jan. 24 world premiere.

Touching on contemporary cultural trends, the popular/high art divide and celebrity obsession while showcasing world-renowned artists, "Exit" offers broad audience appeal, particularly for urban and international viewers captivated by underground art, as well as film fans fascinated by unconventional narrative techniques.

An outgrowth of the graffiti art that originated with '70s B-Boy culture, street art features the same outdoor locations and outlaw attitudes as its precursor, incorporating additional media into artworks, including stencils, posters, stickers and sculptural materials.

French expat Thierry "Terry" Guetta, a Los Angeles retailer and compulsive home videographer, gets caught up in the movement while accompanying his street artist cousin, aka Invader, on nighttime excursions posting his Space Invader mosaic images. After experiencing the adrenaline rush of documenting Invader illegally posting his guerilla artwork, Guetta is hooked and begins seeking out other artists to film, including Shepard Fairey (who originated the "Obey" and Barack Obama poster-like images), Buff Monster and Neck Face.

Guetta rapidly gets drawn into the shadowy world of street art and begins traveling around the country and Europe assisting artists with their frequently illegal installations over an eight-year period on the pretext of making a documentary, despite his lack of any filmmaking experience.

The only one he can't manage to connect with is the pseudonymously named British graffiti stencil artist Banksy, who obsessively conceals his identity from all but his closest associates. But in 2006, when Banksy arrives in Los Angeles, Guetta jumps at a chance opportunity to assist him, gradually working his way into the artist's confidence, so that when Banksy asks Guetta to finally deliver his promised documentary, the Frenchman is practically obliged to comply.

Culling random images and footage from hundreds of videotapes, many undated or undocumented, Guetta produces "Life Remote Control" a 90-minute documentary so unwatchable that Banksy questions whether Guetta may just be "someone with mental problems and a camera." So he sends his protege on a new mission that entirely flips the arc of the film, inserting Banksy in the role of filmmaker and casting Guetta as the street artist Mr. Brainwash, providing the Frenchman with a shot at fame like he'd previously only dreamed of.

The outcome is a nested film structure, with Guetta's rough, run-and-gun footage of artists at work serving as the departure point for Banksy's more polished perspective on the intricacies of the artistic process, the commodification of art and the nature of celebrity. Banksy appears both at work in Guetta's footage with his features obscured and in an on-camera interview wearing a hooded sweatshirt, his face hidden and voice disguised.

Slyly narrated by actor Rhys Ifans and featuring extensive interviews with Banksy as well as Guetta, an enigmatic and self-aggrandizing subject whose frequently amusing and improbable statements stretch credibility, "Exit Through the Gift Shop" also includes exclusive footage of well-known street artists creating their work.

The title appears to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to the commercial aspect of art exhibition and sales.

By Justin Lowe

Fox Searchlight's sudden decision to toss "Crazy Heart" into the heat of December and therefore the Oscar competition casts a brighter spotlight -- and greater scrutiny -- on what is a modest, rather conventional depiction of an aging and alcoholic country musician on a lengthy downward spiral. Had this film appeared later at Sundance, you would have the pleasure of discovering a fine performance by Jeff Bridges in an otherwise unremarkable movie. But with his best actor candidacy already announced, you start to notice his uncanny resemblance to Kris Kristofferson and speculate about how much this performance derives from Rip Torn's still-memorable turn as a ruthlessly self-absorbed country singer in the 1973 film "Payday."

Make no mistake: Bridges more than delivers the goods for Oscar eligibility. He is the mesmerizing, dangerous, unpredictable heart of "Crazy Heart." He is a damn good reason to see the film, and Maggie Gyllenhaal and the ever-mysterious, shockingly beautiful New Mexico desert are a couple of others.

But even with a more upbeat ending given to this adaptation of Thomas Cobb's downbeat novel, some 22 years out of print, "Crazy Heart" might struggle for an audience. Whether a drunk recovers or not, you still have to pass time with a guy you know will screw up just about every opportunity coming his way.

Bridges' Bad Blake earns his name. He can't always get through a set without having to go backstage to vomit. Even so, you figure cigarettes might kill him before the booze does. Either way, it'll be a tight race.

Once a genuine star, he now plays with teenage pickup bands and performs at bowling alleys. Women slip him phone numbers, though, so he has something other than a bottle to get him through the night.

He meets a cute, very young journalist (Gyllenhaal), to whom he grants an interview. So the interview gives you his backstory -- four marriages and a son he hasn't spoken to in years -- while these two fall into a high-risk relationship. It's especially high risk for the reporter, who has a 4-year-old son.

The question in movies about abusers is where exactly will rock bottom be and when will he hit it? One pretty much knows it will have something to do with that young boy, especially when Gyllenhaal says she couldn't live without him.

Bridges gives Bad Blake a rough charm that sees him through hard situations and attracts the occasional friend like Robert Duvall's compassionate tavern owner. As he rumbles to one-night stands throughout the Southwest in a battered car, he has his mood swings, but one senses what really keeps him going is the music. It matters to him. He connects his life to his music and lives his songs onstage and off. Bridges is not a bad singer, either, thoroughly convincing one that he once could have been a headliner.

There is a smart subplot involving a younger country star, well played by Colin Farrell. Once his protege, Bad Blake now feels the sting of his success. But when they meet, the singer clearly does not emulate any of Bad Blake's self-destructive ways. The star tries very hard to help his old friend and begs him to write songs for which he will pay grandly.

Actor Scott Cooper makes his debut as a writer-director, but he's working with tired material. As it is, Bridges and the cast perform wonders to make "Crazy Heart" seem as fresh as it does. But an ex-star out of control and the self-destructive drunk is a cross between types with too many antecedents in other movies.

"Crazy Heart" is the second salvage job by Fox Searchlight in as many years. The film was made for about $7 million by Country Music Television, a unit of Viacom. When Paramount was about to throw it into the scrap heap of a video release, the film was purchased by Fox Searchlight. Unlike that unit's rescue of last year's "Slumdog Millionaire" from Warner Bros., "Crazy Heart" lacks that spark of originality. So what Fox Searchlight has salvaged essentially is a highly watchable performance by Bridges, one of many he has furnished throughout a long career.

By Kirk Honeycutt

Christopher Isherwood was one of the great prose writers of the 20th century, a man of complexity, honesty and wit, and the fashion designer Tom Ford, making his carefully stylised directorial debut, has done an altogether admirable job of bringing to the screen what many regard as his best novel.

Born in 1904, Isherwood grew up with the cinema, was fascinated by the relationship between literature and the new medium, and his most famous line occurs his most celebrated book, ­Goodbye to Berlin: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking." Over the years he worked frequently on movies (his masterly novella, Prater Violet, was based on his experience of co-writing the 1934 Berthold Viertel film Little Friend), and when he and WH Auden left Britain just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Auden settled into the literary world of New York while Isherwood travelled west to be close to Hollywood and to California-based students of ­eastern religions.

Isherwood touched on Hollywood in The World in the Evening, his first novel set in America, and satirised it in the adaptation of Waugh's The Loved One that he made with Terry Southern, which he spoke of as his most enjoyable experience in the cinema. He can be spotted as a party guest in his friend George Cukor's final film, Rich and Famous (1981). A ­Single Man, however, published in 1964, while as semi-autobiographical as the rest of his fiction, has no reference to Hollywood. Its background is a very specific time in America: the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 when the nation seemed on the brink of annihilation, but before the escalation in Vietnam and the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s. And its setting is that rootless, lotus-eating southern California, where conformity and eccentricity painfully coexist and where anything seems possible. Several generations of British homosexuals, from the film director James Whale in the 1930s through Isherwood in the 40s, to the screenwriter Gavin Lambert and the painter David Hockney (both close friends of Isherwood) in the 50s and 60s, found a liberating freedom there.

The central character is the openly gay George Falconer, a 58-year-old British exile and professor of literature at a middling Los Angeles university, living a few minutes from the beach since 1938. He's played by Colin Firth with an unforgettable intensity. Observing the world through horn-rimmed spectacles in an apparently detached, ironic, quizzical manner, he's a camera with its shutter open and appears as coldly fastidious and un-Californian as his immaculate suit, white shirt and tie. But George, like Isherwood at that time, is concealing an inner turmoil. Isherwood was worried about losing his young partner, the American painter Don Bachardy and thinking of a move back to England or to the more relaxed San Francisco. George is in a state of anguish over the recent death in a car crash of Jim (Matthew Goode), his lover of 13 years, whose family ignored George's existence. He also finds increasingly infuriating both the homophobia of the political right and the bland understanding of middle-class liberals, and regards his time as a teacher wasted on a new generation of shallow students.

The action takes place in a single day, Isherwood arriving at this day-in-the-life form after re-reading Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, which was in turn inspired by James Joyce's Ulysses. Of the films based on these novels, Ford's is, I think, the best, though Isherwood's often savage social criticism – of university life, the straight world and cultural homogenisation – has been considerably softened up. A central theme is ageing and mortality, the inevitability of one's own death and that of those you love.

When the book appeared in 1964 the novelist and critic Stanley Kauffmann noted in his perceptive review striking resemblances between A Single Man and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, and he even suggested it might well have been called "Death in Venice, Cal". This dramatic thrust has been further emphasised by Ford and his screenwriter David Scearce, borrowing, consciously or unconsciously, from a French movie dating from around the same time as Isherwood's novel, Le Feu Follet, where the protagonist, at odds with a distrusted world, carries with him everywhere a Luger, with which he proposes to commit suicide. Likewise, George has a gleaming black revolver that he similarly fetishises, buys bullets for and thinks of using.

While engaging in reveries and flashbacks, George goes about his business as a teacher, conducting a class on Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan and challenging his students to think about conformity and prejudice. He has two particularly remarkable encounters, one with an old friend, the other with a young student. The old friend is Charley (the excellent Julianne Moore), an English divorcee considering returning to London, with whom he has an extended, boozy dinner. The student is a sensitive outsider, the insecure bisexual Kenny (Nicholas Hoult). Both penetrate George's carapace, bringing out a frankness and vulnerability he's tried to ­conceal.

Exposed to searching close-ups throughout, Colin Firth gives the performance of his career as George, and subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, gradations of colour and visual texture reflect and complement his changing moods as the day goes on. This is a self-conscious, superbly crafted, deeply felt movie. It's not a gay film but the story of a gay man, a single man in several senses, but also everyman in the way we respond to him, as we do to Clarissa Dalloway or Leopold Bloom.

By Philip French

Not that there was any doubt that, when it came to restaging the 1865 Lewis Carroll classic for a 21st century sensibility, Tim Burton would be the man for the job.

But even the filmmaker's trademark winsomely outlandish style doesn't prepare you for the thoroughly enjoyable spectacle that is his "Alice in Wonderland."

A fantastical romp that proves every bit as transporting as that movie about the blue people of Pandora, his "Alice" is more than just a gorgeous 3D sight to behold.

Armed with a smartly reshaped but still reverential script by Linda Woolverton ("Beauty and the Beast," "The Lion King"), Burton has delivered a subversively witty, brilliantly cast, whimsically appointed dazzler that also manages to hit all the emotionally satisfying marks.

Disney won't have to consume any little cakes in glass boxes in order for the resulting worldwide boxoffice to reach colossal heights.

That's a given for this PG-rated (blame it on that smoking caterpillar) release, which also should emerge as an early, cross-category Oscar contender.

No longer a wide-eyed child, Alice Kingsleigh (a pitch-perfect Mia Wasikowska) is now an easily distracted 19-year-old who seems hopelessly out of sync with her muted Victorian surroundings.

Dodging a garden-party marriage proposal from the dorky son of a lord and lady, Alice instead opts to take off after a pocket watch-clutching rabbit (voiced by Michael Sheen), giving those 3D glasses their first major workout as she plunges deeper and deeper into Underland.

Although she doesn't realize it, Alice has been down this particular rabbit hole before, when she was a much younger, more spirited girl.

But before she's able to get back in touch with her "muchness," she'll bond with a mercury-poisoned Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp, in another blissfully out-there tragicomic performance) and butt heads with the tyrannical Iracebeth (a never-better Helena Bonham Carter, who is an absolute scream of a Red Queen).

Whether they were required to spend quality time in front of a greenscreen or were totally CGI creations, all the usual suspects, from the rotund Tweedledee and Tweedledum (Matt Lucas times two) to the disembodied Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry) to the fearsome Jabberwocky (the great Christopher Lee), are present and brilliantly accounted for in collaboration with special effects master Ken Ralston.

Although Carroll purists might pooh-pooh some of the script's more radical alterations, like bringing Alice up to legal age, the shift helps hit home the film's welcome message of female empowerment.

Ultimately, it's the visual landscape that makes Alice's newest adventure so wondrous, as technology has finally been able to catch up with Burton's endlessly fertile imagination.

Also taking their cues from John Tenniel's original illustrations, Robert Stromberg's fanciful production design and costume designer Colleen Atwood's ever-inspired wardrobe selection help make it quite the trippy trip.

By Michael Rechtshaffen