When I watch a Tim Burton, I almost always walk away with the same reaction: the visual world created in the film is fascinating and arresting, but the story lacks narrative force. When I watch a Tim Burton film, I am reminded throughout that I am experiencing the work of an art director, not the more traditional writer-director.<br /><br />When I watched Lemony Snicket, I was left with that timburton feeling. The visual world is stunning and inventive, particularly the sets, but I was not engaged. It felt a little bit like Fellini-for-children, in that the film unfolded like a dream sequence. Each stop in the film's sequence of sets is bizarre, and makes a great creative effort to lure the audience, but the range of emotions played out by the characters at each of those stops seems both limited and stilted. The characters are very animated, but are, ultimately, very flat and uninteresting. I never gave in to my willing-suspension-of-disbelief -- and, trust me, that's usually not very hard to win.<br /><br />As you would expect from an art director's creation, the set design and visual effects of Lemony Snicket are the real stars of the film. If that's your cup of tea, then you will probably like this film. It has received a number of admiring reviews, and I'm willing to admit that I might be rewarded with some interesting symbolic insights were I too study this film more closely. The star-sets do create an aura of dark intensity, with a sort of Freudian depth.<br /><br />Generally speaking, though, I have a very negative reaction to this film. It represents a class of movies -- most strongly typified by Tim Burton's films -- where too much energy is devoted to the purely visual elements of the work. The directors of this class of film are obviously gifted in the domain of creating unique visual worlds ... but the flimviewing world would be far better off if they would see fit to collaborate with equally talented storytellers.