Christine Edzard

You could say that Sucker Punch is a nymphet version of The Snake Pit or Shutter Island, or a live-action, green-screened redo of The Powerpuff Girls, or Black Swan (Carla Gugino has the demanding dance master role here) with a higher nightmare quotient, or an $82 million tribute to Jess Franco's sublimely cheesy women-in-prison movies of the '70s, or an Americanization of Norifumi Suzuki "pinky violence" melodramas (Girl Boss Guerrilla, Sex and Fury) of the same decade, or, in its backstory about a decent girl deprived of her inheritance and consigned to grow up in a prisonlike environment, a gloss on mid-19th-century classics from Jane Eyre to Little Dorrit.