Almost a decade I ago I wrote for the Guardian in London that Tim Burton has evolved as if he were Steven Spielberg's warped, guilt-free, Gentile younger brother. That seems truer than ever. He's one of the few directors whose name alone can sell a film, and one of the fewer whose visual signatures tickle the collective imagination of the mass audience. My favorite Burton creation in recent years was Scraps, the hero's long-dead dog in "The Corpse Bride": the Corpse Bride returns him to her new spouse as bones in a gift box, which immediately re-form into an X-ray image of a lovable, scrappy terrier. (See all three characters, above.) Now Burton has one of the art world's ultimate seals of approval: a show at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
(See photos from the exhibit, too.)