Tim Burton makes a habit of imbuing his films with a dark, disturbing, yet often child-like sense of wonder, whether they serve as comedy (Pee Wee’s Big Adventure), drama (Ed Wood, Big Fish) or animation (The Corpse Bride).  Only his musical adaptation of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street feels a little too grim for its own good, but when human meat pies are in play, that might be hard to avoid.  And the director has had a rather low percentage of outright failures; while Mars Attacks was simply lacking, Burton’s remake of Planet of the Apes is his only laughably bad film.  Alice in Wonderland, then, poses an interesting puzzle: a somewhat (but not completely) visually arresting film, it falters when trying to convey the tone that has served him so well.  Yet it also displays some of the most embarrassing work by two of his favorite actors, Johnny Depp and wife Helena Bonham-Carter, as well as a shockingly scattered, sideways view of the characters and events in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its follow-up, Through the Looking Glass.

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..because Brooklyn’s Most Overwrought and Conscience-Stricken just didn’t work well with test audiences.

Eddie, Sal and Tango are three New York cops who never meet, and barely cross paths for the duration of director Antoine Fuqua’s (Training Day) new film.  That Fuqua should be able to make three simultaneously dire stories sync up so palpably is to his credit.  Brooklyn’s Finest may suffer from an abundance of tired cop-story scenarios and gimmicks, but you can’t take away from the intensity of its trio of lead performers.

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I’m torn about how to approach a review of Cop Out.  If Kevin Smith directed an intentional throwback to 80’s buddy/cop movies, he certainly got the flavor of it.  The dissenting, loud-mouth cops who are always playing against the rules;  the captain sitting at his desk calling them out for their disruptive behavior on the job;  the cops’ domestic issues encroaching on the case;  the three-note synthesizer score and overly-clichéd song choices…all of these elements are in there, along with a healthy dose of laugh-out-loud humor.   But is that Kevin Smith’s doing?  Much has been written about how this is Smith’s first “director-for-hire” job, filming someone else’s script, and clearly it is a more action-oriented effort than Clerks, Mallrats or Chasing Amy.  But the question remains:  what if it wasn’t intentional?   The kudos simply can’t go to Smith on this one, though most of the blame can.

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George A. Romero’s original version of The Crazies (1973) was alternately exciting and dull, a film about madness in small-town America and the violence that erupts both because of it and in efforts to end it.  Sadly, the film has never been one to gain much notoriety; Romero’s Dead films grabbed the ample spotlight provided the director, but the earlier version bore all the earmarks of his style: low-budget production, scarcely a recognizable actor, a plodding sense of terror, and a social message just under the surface that would likely be ignored.  Romero’s film was solid, but frankly didn’t amount to much.

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