You’ll be extremely alarmed to learn that two-time Golden Globe winner Jim Carrey stars as Count Olaf, an outrageously diabolical actor and master of disguise who is determined to swindle the Baudelaire orphans out of their family fortune in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. The film also stars two-time Academy Award winner Meryl Streep as the children’s overanxious Aunt Josephine and two-time Oscar nominee Jude Law as the voice of Lemony Snicket. The result is a dreadful spectacle, a phrase that here means, “it will stir the imagination of the entire family as it shatters the mold of adventure stories and evokes the magic of truly classic entertainment.”

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, produced by DreamWorks Pictures in collaboration with Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Films, stars Jim Carrey, Jude Law (A.I. Artificial Intelligence) as the voice of Lemony Snicket, Liam Aiken, Emily Browning, Timothy Spall, Catherine O’Hara, Billy Connolly (An Everlasting Piece), Cedric the Entertainer and Meryl Streep (The Post). Directed by Brad Silberling (Casper) from a screenplay by Robert Gordon based on the books The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room and The Wide Window by Lemony Snicket, the film is produced by Laurie MacDonald, Walter F. Parkes and Jim Van Wyck, and executive-produced by Scott Rudin, Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black), Julia Pistor and Albie Hecht. If you know anything at all about any of these people, you know they are all suspiciously successful, successfully suspicious, or both.