Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Tim Burton, 2016)

Tim Burton, a genius of the fantastical in the '80s and '90s, has now survived on the good will of his fans for almost as long as M. Night Shyamalan, albeit that the body of work he had accumulated was considerably more substantial and that there have been enough upward blips in the decline since then, such as 2007's Sweeney Todd to sustain hopes of a possible return to his mercurial past form. But this isn't one of them.
Asa Butterfield, in search of the truth of what happened to his grandfather back in 1943 and ending up there himself through a time portal, at a home for children with supernatural talents, is as thankfully off-centre as he was as a child actor, now playing the teenage protagonist. The support of the arch Eva Green as the matron of the home, as well as a seriously OTT Samuel L. Jackson, sporting yet another daft hairstyle as the villain after the kids' eyes, i.e. the key to immortality, are stable foundations to build on too. But that isn't enough. Jane Goldman's script can't get past being a derivation of Harry Potter and there's neither the sense of menace nor timing required to make it tick. In short, it's actually quite tedious, which is something you'd never have thought a Burton film could be.

5/10