Today Tim Burton’s 18th feature film, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, hits theaters. Burton is known for a gothic, extravagant visual style—and perhaps not a ton of character depth or attention to story details. But he’s directed several classics, and had a hand in big cinematic trends, from blockbuster comic book adaptations to the Disney live-action remakes. His films range from family-oriented children’s stories and niche genre adaptations to adult revenge dramas and violent mystery stories. Throughout that range he’s maintained a level of production design complexity that make his films sumptuous to behold even if the story isn’t quite spectacular. To celebrate his latest film, we went back through his entire filmography and ranked his work from worst to best.
It may be the biggest financial success of Burton’s career, but it’s also a wholly unnecessary sequel to a Disney classic. Alice Kingsleigh (Mia Wasikowska), facing a marriage proposal from a man she does not love, follows the White Rabbit into Wonderland. Though the film intertwines characters from Lewis Carroll’s original book—the Mad Hatter, the Caterpillar—with those from the follow-up Through The Looking Glass—Jabberwocky, the White Queen—it turns what was a surreal curiosity into a big-budget CGI action film.
Burton’s latest film is his entry in the slowing trend of YA fiction adaptations. This is basically a different version of an X-Men story with younger children and a healthy dose of time-travel thrown in for good measure. The source material suits Burton’s stylistic touchstones—odd outcasts living in their own special world—but the script is incredibly clunky. Only Eva Green and Samuel L. Jackson spice things up, but they’re not around long enough to save the movie.
A remake of the 1968 science fiction classic had been in development since the late 1980s, with directors involved ranging from Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson to Chris Columbus and James Cameron. Pretty much any one of those versions sound better than the one Burton made. And while it's pretty clunky from beginning to end, the strangest moment is still the head-scratcher twist ending when Mark Wahlberg’s astronaut returns home. The movie's only redeeming qualities are the unintentional similarities to a comic book written by director Kevin Smith, which inspired an insanely funny story about his few professional interactions with Burton during a college Q&A.
It was a longtime dream of Johnny Depp to play the lead role of Barnabas Collins in a film adaptation of the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, which put out more than 1,200 episodes from 1966 to 1971. So when he finally got the chance to play the vampiric Collins, Depp recruited Burton onto the project. But it’s yet another example of Burton focusing too much on how he can perfect visuals instead of figuring out how to make the story work. Dark Shadows has a stellar cast, but it never takes full advantage of them, especially the crown jewel that is Eva Green. She’s electric, has great chemistry with Depp, and yet this adaptation does not shine as brightly as she does.
Margaret Keane (Amy Adams) paints in a distinctive style that focuses on children with huge eyes. Her artistic fraud husband Walter (Christoph Waltz) takes credit for her work because he convinces her nobody will buy work by a female artist. During their divorce, Margaret becomes religious, reveals the truth of the scheme during a radio interview, and proves in court that she’s the true painter. Waltz and Adams give typically great performances, but the film drags for long stretches and moves hesitantly along as it searches for the most interesting points of the story.
Burton's adaptation of Roald Dahl's novel focuses much more on Charlie Bucket (Freddie Highmore) and his family than candy king Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp) and his secret factory. There are some decent moments, but the movie largely falters thanks to the rewritten songs by Danny Elfman and Depp’s performance, which try as he might to insist was based on Howard Hughes or Charles Foster Kane, still gives off late-career Michael Jackson vibes.
While working as an animator for Disney in the mid-1980s, Tim Burton directed a 30-minute parody short about a young Victor Frankenstein reviving his beloved dog. (The cast included Shelley Duvall and Sofia Coppola.) But Disney hated the dark tone, found it unsuitable to accompany the re-release of Pinocchio in theaters, and fired Burton. Following his success as a director, Burton got a chance to not only remake his film, but expand it into a stop-motion feature. It’s still one of the best retellings of Mary Shelley’s classic novel, taking the gothic horror and transmuting into one about a boy’s enduring love for his strange pet.
A film adaptation of a trading card series, this is the slapstick comedy version of Independence Day Ed Wood would’ve directed if he’d ever been given a blockbuster budget. President James Dale (Jack Nicholson), his wife (Glenn Close), and daughter (Natalie Portman), struggle to lead the country while under attack from vicious Martian warships. It doesn’t sound laugh-out-loud funny, but a lot of the darkness gives way to silliness, especially the way humans discover they can fight back and repel the alien attackers.
Much of the criticism of this adaptation of the beloved Stephen Sondheim musical centers around the not-quite Broadway quality of the singing. But this is one of Burton’s late-career gems, a bloody and fantastical adaptation that sacrifices some of the Broadway chops to present more stomach-churning visuals than are possible onstage. It is a mercilessly dark musical that eschews levity and heaps violence on top of more violence.
Burton co-directed this stop-motion animated version of a Russian folktale with Mike Johnson. Despite Johnson's involvement, Corpse Bride does have the hallmarks of a Burton feature, right down to the casting of Johnny Depp as Victor, the shy pianist uncertain of his upcoming marriage, and Helena Bonham Carter as the Corpse Bride who complicates the wedding. It’s a gloomy but entrancing Victorian fairy tale—and interestingly shot on DSLR cameras instead of 35mm film like previous stop-motion features. It also features one of the most stripped-down and pleasing scores of Danny Elfman’s career.
A very loose adaptation of Washington Irving’s short story, this version reimagines Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) as a police constable in NYC reassigned to the country to investigate a series of beheadings the locals attribute to an undead Hessian mercenary (Christopher Walken). The prop-work of Crane’s investigations are the kind of grotesque masterpieces Burton delights in filming, and the plot unfolds like a smart slasher film. Burton once referred to himself as “not the greatest action director in the world,” and Depp as “not the greatest action star,” which is definitely true. But this third collaboration between the two makes for an excellent fish-out-of-water horror mystery.
The Superman film series proved that the right comic book property could have longevity at the movies, but Tim Burton’s Batman is the true origin today's comic book blockbuster trend. Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) and the Joker (Jack Nicholson) face off agains the backdrop of Gotham City’s bicentennial. The film was a runaway success, and it also features some of the best design work of Burton’s career and two of the best lead performances in a comic book film ever.
Tim Burton’s father died in 2000, followed by his mother in 2002. Though he never described his relationship to his parents as a close one, the loss clearly affected him. Big Fish deals explicitly with the loss of a parent and bridging the gap between generations. Will Bloom (Billy Crudup) returns to his childhood home in Alabama to spend time with his ailing father Edward (Albert Finney), a man who tells fantastical tall tales about his exploits as a young man (Ewan McGregor). It’s the perfect combination of heartfelt drama and surreal tangents, forming Burton’s most personal film since Edward Scissorhands.
After Burton was fired by Disney, the strength of his short films Vincent and Frankenweenie caught the eyes of producers at Warner Bros. and Paul Reubens. They hired him for his feature film debut. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is a manic, technicolor throwback to comic actors like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. It’s big and unapologetically slapstick, as Pee-wee searches for his lost bicycle at the Alamo in San Antonio and later in Hollywood. The strength of this debut still shows decades later.
The financial success of Batman allowed Burton the creative freedom to indulge all of his creative whims for the sequel. It ultimately wasn’t as much of a hit with audiences, but Batman Returns is a more highly concentrated achievement demonstrating Burton’s visual flair. This time the Batman story takes place around Christmas, as the caped crusader faces off against corrupt businessman Max Shreck (Christopher Walken), the Penguin (Danny DeVito), and Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer). This kind of intense singular look only comes from a director with too much creative control and is exactly the kind of thing the Marvel Cinematic Universe lacks.
An inventor (Vincent Price) living in a gothic mansion on a hill creates a young boy (Johnny Depp), but dies before completing him, leaving the boy with large, sharp scissors for hands. An Avon saleswoman (Dianne West) discovers Edward and brings him home to meet her family, including her young daughter Kim (Winona Ryder). But Edward, mostly silent and unable to assimilate into the neighborhood, gets ostracized as odd and dangerous. This is without a doubt Burton’s most personal film, and it’s incredibly strange. But it's also a rightly beloved quirky Christmas story.
It’s rare for haunted house stories to be dark comedies instead of horror films full of jump-scares. That’s part of what makes Beetlejuice so compelling, that it sits at odds with almost every other film that draws on similar subject matter. Barbara (Geena Davis) and Adam Maitland (Alec Baldwin) are newly deceased, and as ghosts they haunt their old home in an attempt to scare away the new residents, the Deetzes. Only the daughter, Lydia (Winona Ryder), can see them, but as the Maitlands grow more desperate they turn to the services of Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) for help. The cast is terrific, the grotesque makeup effects are still impressive, and the humor and horror are perfectly balanced.
This film considers Ed Wood, popularly regarded as the worst film director of all time, as a misunderstood passionate artist, and that yearning for artistic expression in the face of critical rejection definitely struck a chord with Burton. It’s not like Alice in Wonderland is Plan 9 From Outer Space, but it’s easy to see some parallels between how Wood (Johnny Depp) feels treated by the industry and how Burton sees himself as an artist. This is one of Johnny Depp’s greatest performances, Martin Landau rightly won Best Supporting Actor for his turn as Bela Lugosi. Unlike most Burton films, it’s not a visual overload, but its use of black-and-white gives complexity to the characters rather than the color palette.
