Sweeney ToddThe 'Demon Barber of Fleet Street' transitions to the big screen in Tim Burton's glorious, gruesome, full-blooded adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's hit Broadway musical.
The Victorian-era London setting gets an eerily heightened horror movie makeover in Burton's first collaboration with Oscar-winning production designer Dante Ferretti.
A studio-reconstructed Fleet Street, complete with reflected moonlight and shadowy cobblestone lanes, incorporates sets for Mrs Lovett's pie shop and attic barber shop; sinister locales in which the venal instincts of the pathologically tormented Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp) and lovelorn Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) find macabre and grotesque expression.
Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall and Sacha Baron Cohen lend robust support in the skulking and skulduggery departments, while Depp and Bonham Carter gamely throw themselves into the deliriously staged musical numbers.
"Burton has taken Sondheim's quasi-operatic, mock-penny-dreadful exercise in Dickensian-Brechtian Grand Guignol as the pretext for something highly personal and typically obsessive. Not since Vincente Minnelli has anyone directed a musical with such absolute mise-en-scene" J Hoberman, The Village Voice
