Tim Burton

At the center of Tim Burton's lush new fairy tale is Edward Bloom, a Big Fish who lives so large that, to hear him tell it, where he swims the minnows are whale-sized. Edward, played in his prime by robust Ewan McGregor and on his deathbed by crusty Albert Finney, is an Alabama gallant and traveling salesman who weaves stories out of whole cloth, then embroiders them in crimson reds and canary yellows. Or so it seems to his estranged son, Will (Billy Crudup), a journalist who views the truth in black and white.

A brooding boy with wild black hair and shears for hands - it's an image that Tim Burton has carried around in his head for years. Back when he was a brooding boy with wild black hair - a misfit Valley kid at Burbank High - Burton would sketch the character in his notebook: tall and skinny, with giant scissors at the end of each arm. Seventeen years later, Burton, 32, has finally gotten the image out of his head and onto the screen. Edward Scissorhands, a gleefully demented fairy tale, opened Friday across the country.

The aliens in "Mars Attacks" have come to destroy our way of life, and they are doing us a favor. At least in the decidedly eccentric opinion of director Tim Burton - his heroes, remember, include Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood and Pee-wee Herman - whose perspective on American culture is decidedly unique. His is a disaster movie with a twist: We are the disaster. The characters in this movie represent the worst from all walks of American life. They include an image-conscious president (Jack Nicholson)

Now, a good host introduces his guests. But in the spectral, hyperkinetic comedy Beetlejuice, director Tim Burton is not a good host, although he is incontestably an imaginative one. It's up to us to make the introductions: Topper, have you met Pee-wee's Playhouse ? Beetlejuice is a supernatural spoof set in a Connecticut country house whose L. L. Bean-clad owners die in a freak car crash but leave their genial spirits to haunt their beloved three-story. Trouble is, Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis)

It's not your mother's Alice in Wonderland . Nor is Tim Burton's inspired mash-up of action fantasies your granny's magic-mushroom milkshake of Lewis Carroll's mindbender. If there were truth-in-titling, Burton's movie rightly would be called Alice in Narnia : With Stops at Disneyland, the Shire, Rohan, Naboo, and Oz . The White Rabbit is here. As are the Mad Hatter, Queen of Hearts, and Cheshire Cat. But as reimagined by Linda Woolverton, Disney's resident girl-power scribe ( Beauty and the Beast , Mulan )

When he was a young animator at the Disney Studio, Tim Burton toiled at his drawing board and turned out traditional images. But he also amused himself with a daydream that, once he became a high-profile filmmaker, turned into The Nightmare Before Christmas. First released to much-deserved acclaim in 1993, The Nightmare Before Christmas is back in time for Halloween. And it's a perfect film for the holiday. Burton, the man who gave us Batman, Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, is incapable of a conventional idea.

That "Edward Scissorhands" seems deceptively like children's fantasy says a lot about the way director Tim Burton views the world. From "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" to "Beetlejuice" to "Batman," the visionary Burton has imparted a sense of childlike wonder to his movies. He has preserved that quality even as his pictures have grown progressively darker. "Edward Scissorhands" is his best movie yet, an adult fairy tale about our conflicting fascination and fear when confronted with things we do not understand.

TIM BURTON, Lewis Carroll, Johnny Depp, 3-D Imax - sounds like a party. A Mad Hatter's tea party, with beverages that make you small, cakes that make you big, and tasty images that will feed your head. And there is some nourishment to be had in "Alice," which at its best blends the director's sense of the macabre with Carroll's surreal whimsy. But as parties go, it's not the mindblower you probably hoped for - don't expect to wake up next to boxer Mike Tyson's pet tiger, wondering where the previous day went.

It's 60 minutes of sheer delight - jam-packed with slapstick humor, astonishing acrobatic feats, witty visual effects, romance, heartbreak, and music ranging from jazz to Tuvan throat singing. Oyster , inspired by a book of poems by filmmaker Tim Burton, is a signature work of Israel's award-winning Inbal Pinto & Avshalom Pollak Dance Company. The troupe's three-day run at the Annenberg Center, which began Thursday, marks the end of its latest U.S. tour. While each of the vignettes that make up Oyster evokes its own mood, the overall sense of eeriness and androgyny - and especially the dancers' stark white makeup, fright wigs, and outrageous costumes - are certainly Burtonesque.

Let's hear it for the ugly green guy. If it weren't for Shrek, the puckish computer-animated children's fable about an antisocial ogre who learns to love, this summer at the multiplexes would really, really reek. The DreamWorks release, which delighted both audiences and critics with its whimsically subversive storyline and color-saturated dazzle, has tallied $255.8 million in domestic ticket sales since May 18. Mr. Shrek and his storybook refugees rule the roost this movie season, not only with the most money earned, but with the most satisfied customers.

It's 60 minutes of sheer delight - jam-packed with slapstick humor, astonishing acrobatic feats, witty visual effects, romance, heartbreak, and music ranging from jazz to Tuvan throat singing. Oyster , inspired by a book of poems by filmmaker Tim Burton, is a signature work of Israel's award-winning Inbal Pinto & Avshalom Pollak Dance Company. The troupe's three-day run at the Annenberg Center, which began Thursday, marks the end of its latest U.S. tour. While each of the vignettes that make up Oyster evokes its own mood, the overall sense of eeriness and androgyny - and especially the dancers' stark white makeup, fright wigs, and outrageous costumes - are certainly Burtonesque.

It's not your mother's Alice in Wonderland . Nor is Tim Burton's inspired mash-up of action fantasies your granny's magic-mushroom milkshake of Lewis Carroll's mindbender. If there were truth-in-titling, Burton's movie rightly would be called Alice in Narnia : With Stops at Disneyland, the Shire, Rohan, Naboo, and Oz . The White Rabbit is here. As are the Mad Hatter, Queen of Hearts, and Cheshire Cat. But as reimagined by Linda Woolverton, Disney's resident girl-power scribe ( Beauty and the Beast , Mulan )

TIM BURTON, Lewis Carroll, Johnny Depp, 3-D Imax - sounds like a party. A Mad Hatter's tea party, with beverages that make you small, cakes that make you big, and tasty images that will feed your head. And there is some nourishment to be had in "Alice," which at its best blends the director's sense of the macabre with Carroll's surreal whimsy. But as parties go, it's not the mindblower you probably hoped for - don't expect to wake up next to boxer Mike Tyson's pet tiger, wondering where the previous day went.

With "The Complete Alice In Wonderland," Dynamite has again taken a classic book, whose characters and story are seemingly known well by the general public and provided a fresh, exciting take by going to the trouble of adapting the original work and telling the story as it was originally meant to be told and in a way only the comics medium could tell it. Through the years, various interpretations of the work have tended to focus on characters like...

I'm a bit baffled at the astonishment expressed in some quarters that Tim Burton shows a knack for the movie musical in "Sweeney Todd. " This is the same guy, after all, who made "The Nightmare Before Christmas," one of the best and most popular movie musicals of recent years - also a production whose visual style and palette is strikingly similar to "Sweeney Todd. " Burton's taste for the garish, macabre musical number (see also "The Corpse Bride") goes all the way back to the "Banana Boat" sequence in "Beetlejuice": Any guy who turns shrimp cocktail into grasping zombie fingers is, for my money, the right guy for this job. In fact, it's no surprise to learn that Burton, as a student, fell in love with the power of drama watching "Sweeney Todd" performed on the London stage; he liked it so much he went back to see it three times, eagerly absorbing every minute in each three-hour production.

At the center of Tim Burton's lush new fairy tale is Edward Bloom, a Big Fish who lives so large that, to hear him tell it, where he swims the minnows are whale-sized. Edward, played in his prime by robust Ewan McGregor and on his deathbed by crusty Albert Finney, is an Alabama gallant and traveling salesman who weaves stories out of whole cloth, then embroiders them in crimson reds and canary yellows. Or so it seems to his estranged son, Will (Billy Crudup), a journalist who views the truth in black and white.

Let's hear it for the ugly green guy. If it weren't for Shrek, the puckish computer-animated children's fable about an antisocial ogre who learns to love, this summer at the multiplexes would really, really reek. The DreamWorks release, which delighted both audiences and critics with its whimsically subversive storyline and color-saturated dazzle, has tallied $255.8 million in domestic ticket sales since May 18. Mr. Shrek and his storybook refugees rule the roost this movie season, not only with the most money earned, but with the most satisfied customers.

Apes on horseback, resplendent in tooled-leather armor, rope humans and brand them as if they were cattle. Planet of the Apes, Tim Burton's revisiting of the 1968 cult classic, offers a primal vision of the primate order turned topsy-turvy. It is provocative. It is frightening. It is a mess. There is real art in Burton's vision of the animal planet, with its tree-house cities clustered atop rocky spires evoking the primeval surrealism of Hieronymus Bosch. There is real resonance in the performances of (and Rick Baker's ape makeup for)

When he was a young animator at the Disney Studio, Tim Burton toiled at his drawing board and turned out traditional images. But he also amused himself with a daydream that, once he became a high-profile filmmaker, turned into The Nightmare Before Christmas. First released to much-deserved acclaim in 1993, The Nightmare Before Christmas is back in time for Halloween. And it's a perfect film for the holiday. Burton, the man who gave us Batman, Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, is incapable of a conventional idea.

Here comes Johnny Depp, a little buzzed, a little starstruck. "I just had an unbelievable lunch," enthuses the actor, entering a prairie-wide hotel suite, apologetically tardy for his interview. "It was an interesting group - well, two other people. You'd consider that a group, right? A gaggle. I had lunch with Jon Voight and Michael Gambon. . . . Voight's certainly one of the greats. One of the most gifted, subtle, emotional actors - he's a master. And Gambon, too. So imagine the three of us sitting around, exchanging war stories about various directors.