There are times when addressing a film-maker's personal ticks textually in their films can be a bad idea. Super 8 tried to be both a semi-autobiographical look at a young director and a tribute to the director's obvious influence of E.T., but J. J. Abrams wasn't quite able to meld his two narratives together. Zack Snyder was so well-suited to lurid superhero deconstruction of Watchmen that putting him in charge of the "playing it straight" icons of the DC Comics fiction has proven an increasingly bad idea.
But for all that Tim Burton's recent doubling down of his own aesthetic (when not necessarily to the benefit of the story) has resulted in a rather sour quality record since 2003's Big Fish, something finally woke him up. And while he's always been a filmmaker who's aesthetic sensibilities and storytelling quirks have seemed a bit unstuck in time, his most recent Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children doesn't just play with that idea, that's the literal plot of the film.
And here, it does work.
