Avis Metacritic

Depp's performance is more than just funny - it's ghoulishly endearing.

It's a great time at the movies and a wickedly clever cinematic treat.

It offers wonderful things, but they aren't what's important. It's as if Burton directed at arm's length, unwilling to find juice in the story.

Burton, as usual, is great on atmosphere and comic timing (these are his weirdest moments since Ed Wood), but less so at reining in an overcomplicated plot and dimly lit action scenes.

This bizarre but weirdly bloodless retro-camp exercise is neither funny nor eerie enough to seduce the uninitiated, and will court bemused reactions at best from the series' still-estimable fan following.

Dark Shadows sinks its teeth half-way into its potentially meaty material but hesitates to go all the way.

Dark Shadows manages in two hours what the TV show took six years to do: become irrelevant and remembered only for how sloppy it was.

Dark Shadows is a mess, and it's unclear whether its bizarre recipe of comedy, campy horror, and gothic melodrama will satisfy anyone, regardless of their familiarity with the source material.

"Wood" is still by far Depp and Burton's best collaboration, exhibiting the balance of tone between kitsch parody and zealous fantasy that's missing in Dark Shadows, less a resurrection than a clumsy desecration.

It seems hollow, somehow false, even by its own campy standards.