Ever since Mars Attacks!, Tim Burton has mostly been in the adaptation business, rendering dark and be-curlicued Sleepy Hollows, Alice in Wonderlands, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factorys. With Frankenweenie, he adapts his own work — the first animated short he ever produced for a major film studio, and the…

Pee-wee’s Playhouse, a Saturday-morning staple for Gen X-ers who were, at the time, way older than the time slot’s intended audience, represented the pure, uncut mainstreaming of the late-1980s art scene in New York’s East Village. The first season was even shot on the upper floor of a former neighborhood…

Weddings make such bitchin’ film scenarios because the stakes are believably high: If anything goes wrong, social opprobrium, the loss of your beloved or both can ensue, right in front of your disdainful parents, the clergy, and probably Vince Vaughn. Directors have placed every obvious symbol of holy union in…

Remember back when Bridesmaids was released, and Manohla Dargis referred to it as “unexpectedly funny”? It’s amazing what still survives the editorial gauntlet at the New York Times; it’s like the Whig Intelligencer-Tribune over there. And then a couple of months ago, podcast host Adam Carolla cast his douchey feelings…

In Woody Allen’s new film, To Rome With Love, people — like, really young people — still talk, improbably, about “neuroses.” Horny middle-age businessmen actually stand around the water cooler and ogle the hot secretary, as in the Playboy cartoons of the ancients. In the Allen Legendarium, Freudian psychiatrists never…