Burton's Alice: It's Either Frabjous or Mimsy

Critics are so divided on Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland that it's hard to believe they all went down the same rabbit hole. Most have high praise for the 3-D visuals but some complain there's more Disney than Burton.

• Purists may not care for Burton's updating of Lewis Caroll's classics, but his vision, with "a more empowered 19-year-old Alice, is engaging and amusing," writes Claudia Puig at USA Today. "The visual landscape in which she travels is awash in color, magic and splendor."

• The movie's pretty but unmemorable, complains Katey Rich at CinemaBlend. "We're meant to be dazzled by the visuals and the whimsy," she writes, "when even the youngest child knows the best parts of Lewis Carroll involve the threat of danger and mayhem just below the surface."
• Burton's "literally eye-popping world of beasties, Scots accents and gloom" is one of the most inventive uses of 3-D ever seen, writes Roger Moore in the Orlando Sentinel. The cast, including Jonny Depp as a "madder-than-usual hatter," is near-perfect, he writes.
• Alice is "predictably rich in images," writes Joe Williams at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but it has "little of the heart or madcap energy we might have expected. Somehow, a children's fable about playful language and imagination has become yet another overblown fantasy about a teenager who's been prophesied to lead an army into battle."

(More Alice in Wonderland stories.)