SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET

As the title character in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Johnny Depp gives a controlled, admirable one-note performance in a role that calls for many more notes. This isn't a knock - well, not a huge knock - on his singing of this legendary Stephen Sondheim musical; Depp may not have the vocal power or range to do full justice to Sondheim's and book-writer Hugh Wheeler's masterful creation, but he gives it a good shot, and his morose speak-singing fits director Tim Burton's interpretation of the work. It's the interpretation that's the problem.

THE INVISIBLE

Funny story. I caught director David S. Goyer's The Invisible on Friday afternoon, and later that evening, watched a TV show I'd taped a couple of days prior but hadn't yet seen. During a commercial break, there was a preview for The Invisible. Amazingly, it was the first trailer for the film I'd landed upon, which gave me the unusual opportunity to judge a preview based on its movie, rather than the other way around. And now that I have seen the teaser for the film - a 15-second scare-flick pastiche of screams, slash-edits, and a threatening shriek of "You're dead!!!" - I feel compelled to ask: Did The Invisible's marketing wizards not see the movie, or did they indeed see it, not have a clue about how to market it, and purposely create the most misleading trailer imaginable?

FLIGHTPLAN

Movies such as Flightplan are hell to review. How do I explain, exactly, why the film doesn't work without giving away the plot secrets that prevent it from working? Like last fall's already-forgotten The Forgotten, director Robert Schwentke's airborne thriller involves a missing child. During a trans-Atlantic flight from Berlin to America, Jodie Foster's newly widowed Kyle lays her six-year-old daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston) down for a nap, falls asleep herself, and wakes to find the girl missing. Obviously, escape from the plane is impossible, but Julia is nowhere to be found, and, more disturbingly, no one on the flight seems to remember her being aboard. Could Julia have merely been a figment of Kyle's imbalanced imagination?

CHARLIE & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

For the life of me, I can't figure out what director Tim Burton was trying to accomplish with Charlie & the Chocolate Factory that wasn't previously accomplished by Roald Dahl's book or the beloved 1971 film.