Beautiful, moving film.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Sweeney Todd is one of those horror stories so rich in possible variations that there's no really definitive version--even the Sondheim musical has been done in many styles and all of them memorable in their own ways. This one succeeds where many other Hammer homages has failed, by not only imitating the look and quotient of violence and low-cut gowns of classic Hammer but by taking the source material and running with it in a completely different direction than the ones you're expecting. Like the best of Hammer it's gripping, ingenious, very adult and leaves you with a queasy awareness of the world's nastiness.

This is a great film! It has good period costumes, the charters and acting are convincing, the set is simple and the scenes flow from one to the other. I found myself feeling vary involved in the film.I am usually disappointed by films set in the past and feel that this is the perfect example of what I like in a period film with the hard accents and the attention to detail of the clothing and furniture. The Acting was excellent by the actors of all the main characters and it is a great story of life of London's past.I will find it interesting to see the Johnny Dept version of this film. I am expecting Hollywood to make a mess of it.It was also fun because it was grim but not gruesome so my wife could watch the whole film.This is a classic style horror film with a lot to it.

Sweeney Todd, a resident barber of London, has an urge inside of him to kill. As it grows and grows, he comes to fancy a young woman whom he cannot have -- both because she is married and because he is not physically capable. As they grow closer, he lets her in on his secret and a macabre friendship is born -- one a butcher and the other a maker of meat pies.Ray Winstone is perfect as Sweeney Todd. I don't know him from much outside of "The Proposition" (which everyone loves, but I found disappointing). He has the look of a man worn down by time and heartache, cold enough to kill but sad enough to drive us to sympathy. Other people may picture Todd differently, but I think this look fully captures the darkness and emptiness of the man. All the characters have a very dirty look to them, which I also like -- no perfect conditioning in the hair and daily bathing rituals. I like it raw, and this film gives it to me.This is not a musical version but simply a film with a dark tale to tell. It interests me to see how this one was presented. As I understand it, the original story came from the 1820s or 1840s. Yet, this film version touches on themes like abortion and the complete absence of God, which I would presume to be quite heavy for the time (though I may be mistaken).The denial of God, morality and such is the driving force of this film compared to other versions. It's nihilism through and through, which is like the perfect medicine for someone like myself who was raised on heavy doses of Nietzsche, Kafka and Kierkegaard. Horror films often touch the evil in the world and what drives it, but few films -- horror or not -- really get to the deeper philosophic roots of the meaninglessness of the world in our modern time. Some have tried ("Dark City" comes to mind) but this one really hits the spot.With the Tim Burton and Johnny Depp version having just been released, I presume the BBC version of "Sweeney Todd" will not get as much of a chance. But I would advise you to check it out and compare -- one is a musical, one is not. And Burton, while dark, has his own way of looking at the world. So you're not really seeing the same film twice so much as viewing an entire world fro ma different perspective, something I think is healthy for all of us to do time and again. Give this one a shot, it packs a wallop you cannot deny.

Watching a drama about a character known as the legendary "Demon Barber of Fleet Street" did give me some idea of what I was in for when I sat down to watch Sweeney Todd just after Christmas. Having said that, it would have been all too easy for the writers and producers to write a two-hour script of wall-to-wall slaughter, and I'm glad that they didn't. (Not only because I have no stomach for overtly gory scenes, but because I like to watch something with a little substance to it.)I watched Sweeney Todd with my mum and, as she pointed out, there was a part of Ray Winstone's Todd that was very benevolent. It might sound at odds with the legendary image of Todd, but to Mrs. Lovett he was capable of well-meaning kindness. (It was very convenient, surely, that Todd knew Mr. Lovett was abusive towards his wife just before Mrs. Lovett called him to assist her ill husband.)I haven't yet found out much about the real-life (or should that be legendary?) Sweeney Todd, but I think the scriptwriters did well to flesh out a back story for the character. He may have shed more blood on screen than Hannibal Lecter did in The Silence of the Lambs (the throat-cutting scenes - tastefully shot, though they were - I tried to avert my eyes from, gory scenes aren't my thing at all) but Todd clearly wasn't always a maniac, a murderous barber on the prowl, as one might expect. I recognised the beginning of his descent from man to monster when I felt a lot of sympathy for his father as Todd put a stop to him ever being able to give evidence against his own son.Once the accidental killings occurred and Todd found a rather novel way of disposing of his victims, it took a little longer than you might expect for him to descend into the twisted way of thinking that made him end the lives of so many. Mrs. Lovett was clearly very close to Todd's kinder side, close enough that she was mystified that her multiple lovers never came back to her after a visit to Todd's shop. I had hoped that the ending might have been a little more positive, but instead both Todd and Mrs. Lovett seemed condemned to a more predictable fate. I'm still undecided whether Todd's final end was a little too obvious, or whether it was a clever way of showing that he was wily enough to gain his jailers' trust enough to be able to end his life in the way that the law dictated.