Dark Shadows

Directed by Tim Burton

(PG-13)

**

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Tim Burton has made his “most pleasurable film in years,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Inspired by a 40-year-old Gothic daytime soap opera, this wry comedy follows vampire Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) as he awakens in 1972 America from a 200-year entombment, then adapts with a combination of “lofty entitlement and abject bewilderment.” Though Dark Shadows offers only surface pleasures, Burton’s gifts for “deviant beauty and laughter” have their own liberating power. At least it’s true that this Burton/Depp project isn’t as “dull” as Alice in Wonderland or as “inert” as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, said Rene Rodriguez in The Miami Herald. But Depp and Burton again “enable each other’s most indulgent habits,” making a film “for their own amusement” that eventually uses “a ridiculous CGI-laden climax” to disguise the fact that they have no story to tell. Predictably, Depp plays Barnabas with “lasered intensity,” while Burton delivers “spectacular” art direction, said Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. The film “offers wonderful things,” but they aren’t the things a film needs most.