Popular reviews

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 9

  98

  A life-affirming, empathetic work. This is as good as it gets in terms of Tim Burton, but it's also one of the greatest films of the 1990s, so it's no small feat. Watching it, all I could do is marvel at the glorious monochrome imagery, towering performances, and Burton's warmth and care for the subject and the aesthetic. Best scene: Ed Wood sharing his secret to the woman who would become his second wife in the middle of a malfunctioning Dark Ride. Surrounded by the macabre is a person looking to be accepted as they are.

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★★½ 3

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  “Filmmaking is not about the tiny details. It’s about the big picture.”

  This movie gets the details and the big picture right. And the dialogue is so wonderful, from the resonant power of the scene with Orson Welles about artistic independence (“Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else’s dreams?”) to Bill Murray eagerly anticipating his upcoming sex change ("Goodbye penis!"). ED WOOD is an absurdly rose-colored view of the real Ed Wood at times; it ends with him in "triumph" at the exact second before Wood's life began an irreversible slide into alcoholism, destitution, and death. But it's also a genuinely affectionate tribute to this guy who stuck to his guns, loved the movies, and was, in a lot of ways, years ahead of his time.

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  Review by truman ★★★★★ 6

  Ed Munch

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  Review by john ★★★½

  be yourself, even if being yourself means being a total failure ❤️

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  Review by Dragonknight ★★★★½ 9

  Film #44 of Project 90

  ” We are going to finish this picture just the way I want it... because you cannot compromise an artist's vision.”

  Making a biopic about someone who is known as “The Worst Director of All Time” looks like an easy task, there is a reason that people call him the worst so if you want to make a funny and entertaining comedy you only need to show his “style” of film making and his childish passion for his own works. His life gives you enough material to make at least a couple of parodies, but Tim Burton chooses another way. He doesn't see Edward J. Wood as a talentless man who can be laughed at,…

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  Review by ˗ˏˋ Liam ˊˎ˗ ★★★★½ 3

  movies are kinda magic aren’t they

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  Review by Joe ★★★★★ 4

  Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

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  Review by Will Sloan ★★★★★

  It's interesting that so many of Ed Wood's friends and associates were so adamant in interviews that even though "Eddie" was an out and proud cross-dresser who had a name for his drag persona ("Shirley"), and even though he hung out with a lot of well-known closet-dwellers like Criswell and Paul Marco, and even though his countless novels were loaded with gay/trans themes, he was all man and absolutely positively not gay. This is the line that Tim Burton - a filmmaker who deals in all sorts of camp aesthetics without possessing a queer bone in his body* - pretty much follows here. By all accounts, Wood did have robust heterosexual appetites, but... surely there was something more complex going…

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★★ 1

  80/100

  Faulting this movie for whitewashing Wood's life is goofy—no one could possibly mistake its cartoonish exaggeration for a traditional biopic. Instead, it uses the broad outline of his career as the foundation for an affectionate, heartfelt paean to cockeyed optimism, with Depp as the poignant personification of drive and passion divorced from talent. Making this funny and even borderline heroic rather than cruel was no small feat, and ultimately I don't care that Lugosi was actually married for the last year of his life, or that Wood was a skirt-chasing drunk from an early age. And has there ever been such a non-judgmental portrait of tranvestism? (Even if there has, I bet it's comparatively dreary.) Stunningly beautiful, too—maybe the…

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  Review by Mr. DuLac ★★★★½ 8

  This story's gonna grab people. It's about this guy, he's crazy about this girl, but he likes to wear dresses. Should he tell her? Should he not tell her? He's torn, Georgie. This is drama.
  -Edward D. Wood, Jr.

  This is probably my favorite Tim Burton film now. Most of his films of the last few years have been style over substance, but like I noted with Frankenweenie, he seems to be at his best when he's passionate about the subject matter. You can clearly see this is a personal film for Burton made with a lot of heart.

  You can tell from the get-go that this is not a factual based biopic of Ed Wood, but rather a tribute…

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  Review by liam f ★★★★½ 1

  can't even imagine the amount of restraint it must have taken to somehow avoid using the line "my name is Ed Wood, not Ed Woodn't"

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  Review by basketcasejoel 2

  Tim Burton’s last film