Ed Wood Details

Only one of cinema's finest directors could have so lovingly crafted this homage to one of its worst. Tim Burton's wonderful celebration of awful art, and the fascination it continues to exert, traces the weird career of director Edward D Wood Jr, from his autobiographical exploitation quickie Glen or Glenda — in which he cast himself as an anguished cross-dresser — to his “masterpiece”, the truly terrible Plan 9 from Outer Space. Johnny Depp gives an amazing performance as Wood in a brilliant black-and-white evocation of 1950s life in Grade Z-land, and Martin Landau deservedly won an Oscar for his uncanny impersonation of Wood's low-rent inspiration, Bela Lugosi. The re-creation of Wood's blatantly anti-aesthetic productions is astonishing.

A delightful, charming, straight-faced account of a hopelessly obsessive film-maker and transvestite, which turns his ineffectual life and career into some sort of triumphant celebration of the American dream, making a success of failure; its appeal, thou