We regret to inform you that, despite occasionally embellished overacting by Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep, the Lemony Snicket children's books have been successfully transformed into a worthy entertainment - a word that here means "amusement" or "diversion."

This awful news is surely welcome to the legions of Snicketoids who made Daniel Handler's "Series of Unfortunate Events" into perennial best sellers.

The movie is crammed with Tim Burton-style desolation, foreboding and technological anachronism, though the pessimism at the heart of Handler's dark worldview barely survives interludes of Hollywood sunshine.

Handler (writing as Snicket) respects children. Like Roald Dahl before him, he wants to point out both the possibility and the treachery of language when used by "adults," a word used ironically here to indicate lack of maturity or responsibility. Filmmaker Brad Silberling and adapter Robert Gordon hew to that vision, even when the "adult" actors threaten to chew yards of expensive scenery.

Snicket as narrator, in the gentle voice of Jude Law, warns at the outset that "the movie you are about to see is extremely unpleasant." He's not kidding: Uninitiated children and parents looking for bubbly fun should run screaming in search of a "Wiggles" video. The intriguing Baudelaire children are orphaned after a horrific fire. Bumbling adults send them to live with a certain Count Olaf who resides only 37 blocks away; these tirelessly oblivious guardians resist young Klaus' efforts to explain the more accurate definition of the word "closest" when linked to the word "relative."

Olaf openly hopes to kill off the children and seize the Baudelaire fortune. All other plotting, drawn from the first three books in the series, flows from the deliciously devious mind of Olaf. Babes are dangled from hooks, hurricanes plunge houses into the sea, 14-year-old girls may be married off to leering seniors. The set designs, faithful to Lemony Snicket's celebration of the absurd, make Hogwarts look like Club Med.

The movie drags when the actors become enamored of their own voices and gestures, and the director, apparently mesmerized, sits back to watch. Granted, Olaf is a failed actor, but Carrey's rubber face often overreaches for spectators in distant balconies.

Streep does the same, and we see the danger of actors taking on roles to please their literate children. The stars need to keep other kids in mind, besides their family and friends who will be buying the outtakes on DVD.

Appropriately for a Lemony Snicket world, the children get their parts just right. Emily Browning as inventive Violet and Liam Aiken as Klaus are at once heartfelt and tough. For the climactic scene, Silberling wisely drops the clutter of his sets and zooms in for close-ups on their expressive faces, breaking our hearts in the process. I find the Baudelaire kids more interesting than the cutout characters of "Harry Potter"; they earn their temporary victories through smarts and loyalty, not inexplicable magic.

Stick around for the closing credits. As Lemony Snicket would say, they are literally a sublime excursion into the possibilities of graphics, and figuratively a credit to meticulous filmmakers.

TITLE: "Lemony Snicket's - A Series of Unfortunate Events"DIRECTOR: Brad SilberlingCAST: Jim Carrey, Liam Aiken, Emily Browning, Meryl Streep, Billy Connolly and Jude LawRATED: PG for frightening situations and brief languageGRADE: * * * 1/2 (on a scale of 5)