Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

The conventional wisdom about early-career Tim Burton is that he was an imaginative visual stylist but not a great storyteller.

3105d ago

Tim Burton's direction reminds us of the distinct, peculiar coyness that was always at the heart of his best films.

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Miss Peregrine has all the visual hallmarks of your classic Burton—a child with teeth on the back of her head, a girl who wears lead shoes to keep from floating away (Ella Purnell, swapping powers with another character from the book).

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While the tone is a little inconsistent, especially in the third act, this is mostly Burton back to what he does best. In the quest to expand oneself as a filmmaker, one never wants to do the same thing twice.

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The time-travel element gets awfully twisty, perhaps a little too much so. But there’s great pleasure to be had in the performances, particularly Green’s deliciously avian Miss Peregrine.

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The relatable theme of the magical misfit may not be entirely original. But as brought to life by Burton, Riggs’s fictional vision of a world in which the nonconformist can flourish serves as both a self-portrait of the auteur and a “Wonderland”-like looking glass in which many in the audience will no doubt see a reflection of themselves.

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Ransom Riggs' novel, about a group of special children with extraordinary powers, may as well have been written for Tim Burton to direct.

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Tim Burton enters mashup mode with Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children.

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Burton concocts just enough inventive sights to mark the material as his own, and a brief sequence in which Emma clears out a sunken ship’s watery ballroom with her tremendous breath almost achieves the type of grand weirdness that used to come so easily to the auteur.

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Iconoclastic director gets his mojo back – sort of – with eccentric, energetic adaptation of Ransom Riggs' young-adult novel.

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'Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children': Tim Burton's latest tries way too hard.

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Tim Burton's latest is about a boy who travels back in time to discover a World War II-era school for eccentric children, presided over by a shape-shifting headmistress (Eva Green).

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Confused by the mysterious murder of his grandfather, Jake (Asa Butterfield) travels from Florida to Wales in search of answers. There, he finds a time loop that takes him from 2016 to 1943, and a school populated by extraordinary children — and their even more extraordinary headteacher.

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Burton's never been especially good at finding the internal motor or the rhythmic drive within a scene. This, I think, is why Miss Peregrine stalls, again and again, while the bird woman or Samuel L. Jackson's pointy-toothed, fright-wigged Barron tells us what's up with what we just saw, and what'll happen next.

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With Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, Tim Burton focuses all his energy on a dusty, far-too-droll buildup that's far from worth whatever short-lived excitement his finale brings.

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“Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” certainly brings back that youthful feeling. The wonder of discovery! The exhilaration of possibility! The mild headache of trigonometry midterms!

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Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is bland in ways that go beyond its casting.

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Burton and director of photography Bruno Delbonnel nail some genuinely haunting imagery: Emma tethered kite-like to a rope pulled by love interest Jake; the arrival of the Hollowgasts, an extreme Burton makeover of Jack Skellington via Slenderman via H.P. Lovecraft; squadrons of Nazi bombers overtaking the night sky; a submerged ocean liner repurposed by the peculiars.

3105d ago

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children—a mystical fantasy in which a pipe-smoking headmistress, played by the always alluring Eva Green, cares for a group of specially “gifted” children who survive eternally by reliving a single day in 1943–is in many ways the perfect repository for Burton’s own gloriously peculiar gifts.

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Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children review: Tim Burton's Edwardian fairy tale feels oddly conventional.

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Walking back to the car after a recent screening of “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” my movie-savvy, nearly-seven-year-old son took my hand and asked me sweetly: “Mommy, what was that about?”

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What should have been a charming mix of the bizarre and the charming gets weighted down with clumsy plotting and exposition.

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