Name : Dave Kehr / Alias : Chicago Reader
Griffith's later films are unquestionably superior. But here, in a very real sense, is where the movies began, both as an art and as a business.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
More than a movie about a slave rebellion, it's about the difficulty of reconciling the great moral chasms between thought, vision, and deed.

Name : Alison Willmore / Alias : BuzzFeed News
Turner deserves this treatment; he deserves a film that doesn't soften the era or apologize in any way for his anger; and he deserves a salute for making it happen.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
Debuting writer-director Nate Parker stars in this searingly impressive account of the Nat Turner slave rebellion.

Name : Variety Staff / Alias : Variety
Birth of a Nation is a great epoch in picture making; it's great for pictures and it's great for the name and fame of David Wark Griffith. When a man like Griffith in a new field can do what he has done, he may as well be hailed while he is living.

Name : Richard Brody / Alias : New Yorker
Problematically, Birth of a Nation wasn't just a seminal commercial spectacle but also a decisively original work of art - in effect, the founding work of cinematic realism, albeit a work that was developed to pass lies off as reality.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
The film offers up more than enough in terms of intelligence, insight, historical research and religious nuance as to not at all be considered a missed opportunity .

Name : Keith Phipps / Alias : AV Club
Gone: the liquid reality of dreams and a sense that anything can happen. In its place: another story of quests, destinies, and chosen ones.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
It looks like a CGI head trip gone postapocalyptic. In the film's rather humdrum 3-D, the place doesn't dazzle - it droops.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
It's just hard to know why Mr. Burton, who doesn't seem much interested in Alice, bothered.

Name : Tom Long / Alias : Detroit News
A visually imaginative fairy tale that suffers slightly from its predictable course but still manages to wow at all the crucial moments.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Variety
Alice in Wonderland has its moments of delight, humor and bedazzlement. But it also becomes more ordinary as it goes along, building to a generic battle climax similar to any number of others in CGI-heavy movies of the past few years.

Name : Lou Lumenick / Alias : New York Post
Burton, one of the great visual artists in Hollywood history, is incapable of making an uninteresting movie. Still, I'm not looking forward to the sequel promised in the last scene.

Name : Claire Martin / Alias : Denver Post
Burton and Disney have found a glorious way to interpret fairy tales and fantasies.

Name : Chris Vognar / Alias : Dallas Morning News
[Depp's] wide eyes and high whimsy feel a bit derivative of his Willy Wonka (another collaboration with Burton), but he invests so much of his ample energy and instinct in these roles that it's hard to complain.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Here's a riddle: What's Alice in Wonderland without wonder? It's a beloved character landing in the rubble of wrong-headed revisionism.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
IBurton and Woolverton pursue a message of self-fulfilment, not as vigorously as they might chase a rabbit but to the same delightful end.

Name : Randy Myers / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
You leave the theater with a pleasant grin on your face, but by no means is it as wide as the Cheshire Cat's, and that's a shame.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
When it comes to 3-D visual splendors, give me Wonderland over Pandora any day.

Name : Roger Ebert / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Alice plays better as an adult hallucination, which is how Burton rather brilliantly interprets it until a pointless third act flies off the rails.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Carroll purists and freshman English majors may be aghast at the change in story, but for those who watched Avatar and marveled at the images but were left wanting by the wooden acting and tired story, Alice is a treat.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Indecision haunts every frame. The result is a clattering, hectic spectacle that by the end has run out of inspiration. It's a home for abandoned ideas.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
No knockouts here. No tkos, either.

Name : Laremy Legel / Alias : Film.com
Alice in Wonderland is, strangely, about the movie you'd expect based on the talent involved.

Name : Elizabeth Weitzman / Alias : New York Daily News
"Frabjous" may be a word Carroll invented, but Burton knows just what it means, at least in his own mind. He's clearly excited to invite us inside, and as long as you're open to so much muchness, you'll be very glad he did.

Name : Dave Calhoun / Alias : Time Out
Much of Carroll's magical nonsense remains, even if Burton's film wobbles at the gates of anarchy and ends up being a more average affair than many might expect.

Name : Amy Biancolli / Alias : Houston Chronicle
Its single biggest failing - an affront to Lewis Carroll and the charms of nonsense literature - is the fact that it makes sense.

Name : Thomas Rogers / Alias : Salon.com
I found myself trying so hard to like Alice in Wonderland that the process of watching it exhausted me.

Name : J. Hoberman / Alias : Village Voice
The new Alice is casually absurd, off-handed in its violence, and doggedly on message. The movie is not just three-dimensional but blatantly programmatic.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small, and the pills Tim Burton gives you don't do very much at all.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
Alice in Wonderland isn't quite the natural fit of director and material that it seemed to be on paper, but most of Burton's recent movies have been far more disappointing.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
The sweetly surreal feeling of those original books has been lost. What always felt like an English garden party gone slightly off has been replaced by the grotesque and the Gothic and the overdone.

Name : Rick Groen / Alias : Globe and Mail
The true three-dimensionality here is the old-fashioned kind - Wasikowska's fully rounded performance. Throughout the technical razzle-dazzle, we keep returning to the pallor of that face, the gravity in those eyes.

Name : Christopher Rosen / Alias : New York Observer
It might be time for Johnny Depp and Tim Burton to start thinking about seeing other people.

Name : Roger Moore / Alias : Orlando Sentinel
Purists will squeal, but it's a workable and watchable liberty to take with an oft-filmed yet impossible to film novel.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : I.E. Weekly
"Curiouser and curiouser," says Alice in Tim Burton's latest, and for the first time I don't believe her.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
Though it has a few moments where you can see Burton's imagination giving way to Disney convention, along with a bit of trademark Burton darkness, the pleasures of Alice are virtually always unexpected.

Name : James Rocchi / Alias : MSN Movies
Combines the heavy-handed clamminess of unneeded brand remarketing with the hateful hollowness of overdone and empty computer-generated imagery. . With Burton's uninspired, underdone and underwritten version, you only feel like you're watching money.

Name : Richard Corliss / Alias : TIME Magazine
So how's the movie? Mostly frabjous. The visual palette is more artfully riotous than that of other Alice films, the performances more zestful.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Burton, bless him, knows you can't CG a soul.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : At the Movies
A really interesting movie.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
It's a workmanlike effort that will enchant all but the youngest children while holding the interest of parents. That, by definition, makes for a worthwhile family outing.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
Its best and strangest interludes assert Burton's skills as a fantasist, as well as Depp's as a squirrely, inventive character actor.

Name : Carrie Rickey / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Carroll purists are likely to dismiss this Alice as spuriouser and spuriouser. But who expects a faithful adaptation of a literary classic from Timothy Beetlejuice?

Name : Dana Stevens / Alias : Slate
A film adaptation should, of course, treat its source material as inspiration rather than dogma. But did Burton have to get the books so entirely wrong?

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
Though Burton's film boasts some excellent performances, as the caterpillar says to our heroine, it's merely "almost Alice."

Name : Michael Rechtshaffen / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
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.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
In its big-budget extraordinariness, Alice is awfully.ordinary.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Even Disney and a PG rating can't bury Burton's subversive wit. Like Carroll, he's a master at dressing up psychic wounds in fantasy.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
A succession of chases and fanciful combats, more akin to Dungeons & Dragons than to Carroll, leads to a peculiarly truncated climax. The 3-D effects are enjoyable, but the added depth can't make up for deficits in the concept or the plot.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
Even considering the liberties Burton has taken with the original text, it's tempting to think that Carroll himself would consider him an altogether frabjous match.