It's a Small, Small World

Crane has been sent from New York City to the New England town of Sleepy Hollow to capture whoever's been lopping off local heads like carrot tops. The inspector arrives with both his reason and his implements safely intact, but before long, as with so much in this film, the idea that he's in any way a man of science soon disappears, lost in the mists of Walker's undernourished sense of story and Burton's invariably distracted imagination. Outside of Depp, whose enduring ability to wrest poetry from even the most meager prose remains its own essential mystery, there's not much to hang on to in Sleepy Hollow -- heads may roll, but the movie barely moves. Never strong on narrative to begin with, Burton seems particularly uninterested in this story, which may be why he so casually squanders Christina Ricci's native spookiness and all but ignores her character's relationship with Crane, instead repeatedly, almost fetishistically, cutting to character actor (and girlfriend) Lisa Marie twirling away in flashback. (In a sure sign of directorial malaise, Burton riffs on a scene from Mario Bava's Black Sunday with more fond attention than he does much of his own movie.) There's so little going on with either the film's story or its characters, however, that there is plenty of time to get lost in cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's eerily beautiful visuals. He's drained most of the color out of the images, but unlike Burton, he's done so on purpose.

LIBERTY HEIGHTS | Written and directed by BARRY LEVINSON | Produced by LEVINSON and PAULA WEINSTEIN | Released by Warner Bros. | At AMC, Century 14

SLEEPY HOLLOW | Directed by TIM BURTON | Written by ANDREW KEVIN WALKER | Produced by SCOTT RUDIN and ADAM SCHROEDER | Released by Paramount | Citywide