Rango

The antiquated desert town of Dirt is ramshackle and drought-ridden, a relic of the Old West of the classic western movies—Shane, High Noon, Gunfight at the OK Corral, etc. A stringy-looking lizard named Lars gets stranded there after the terrarium in which he’s traveling gets jounced out of a station wagon speeding along that desert highway. By the time he arrives on Dirt’s all-but-forsaken main street, this mythy-minded (and wildly imaginative) lizard has envisioned himself as a lone gunfighter named Rango, who’s come to Dirt to save it from all that ails it. And that’s just the start of things for this exuberant mash-up of old western movies and much else, a vividly animated mini-epic in which all the characters—or nearly all—are animal caricatures who speak in distinctly human voices. What results is both a parody western and a rousingly antic revival of the old genre. Johnny Depp provides the intriguingly variable voice of Lars/Rango and the film is in some ways a Depp vehicle. Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas and Paradise Cinema 7. Rated PG