19. Dumbo (2019)
Here is the great clunker of the Tim Burton canon. His cumbersome live-action remake of the Disney hit is a great big flightless pachyderm of a film that misses the pathos and charm of the original, saddling itself with 21st-century embarrassment at the whole idea of circus animals and overcomplicating everything. Burton’s instinct may be for a gothic overload of detail, but that feels wrong here.
18. Planet of the Apes (2001)
Burton’s “reimagining” of Pierre Boulle’s novel was the film that signalled his shift into the blockbuster mainstream. But this director’s complex, refined talent tends towards humour, emotion and visual style, not punchy action and plot, and his Pota was disappointing – although there is interest in the fact that the ape stars (like Helena Bonham Carter) were at this stage still using costumes and prosthetics, not mo-cap and CGI.
17. Alice in Wonderland (2010)
This was a thumping box-office triumph, and Burton’s goth take on Alice in Wonderland was what (unfortunately) got him the Dumbo gig – see above – and re-established his bankability as a Hollywood director. But it’s an exasperatingly mannered and often quite dull fantasy version: Mia Wasikowska’s Alice has dark, gloomy circles round her eyes; Johnny Depp (inevitably cast as the Mad Hatter) has peculiar gingery hair and a slippery English-Scottish accent; and Bonham Carter, equally inevitably the Red Queen, has a giant cartoony head. An oddity.
16. Big Fish (2003)
Burton doesn’t really go in for sentimental family cutesiness but really that is what Big Fish is about, despite its various walks on the weird side. The setting is a picturesque 50s anytown where Albert Finney’s ageing retired salesman is on his deathbed, regaling his son (Billy Crudup) about all the larks he got up to as an adventurous big fish in the pond of life, with Ewan McGregor as his younger self in flashback. Is he just making all this up? It’s a question that gets swept away in a gloopy tide of fantasy gibberish.
15. Batman Returns (1992)
Many consider Burton’s second Batman film to be superior to the first, but in my view it is less interesting, despite Michelle Pfeiffer’s rather iconic leather-clad turn as the slinky Catwoman. Michael Keaton is back as the caped crusader but there is a strange performance from Danny DeVito as the cackling Penguin; Burton’s Batman franchise would appear to have run out of steam.
14. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)
Burton gave us something like a classic British tale for children here, and again it is elaborate and eccentric, with the Marmitey Burton flavour thickly spread everywhere. Asa Butterfield is the lonely American kid Jake who becomes obsessed with the stories told by his Welsh grandfather (Terence Stamp), all about an upbringing at the titular home for peculiar youngsters. On travelling to Wales, Jake finds that the home still exists in a cosmic time-warp. Miss Peregrine is played by Eva Green, an actor who feels like a Burton natural (second only to HBC); she also appeared in Dumbo and Dark Shadows.
13. Corpse Bride (2005)
The Burton signature style is in some way boiled down to its essentials in a stop-motion animation co-directed with Mike Johnson. There is some amusement in this Halloweeny bit of fun, set in a shadowy world with Depp voicing the hapless young man called Victor, who has been coerced into an arranged marriage with a young aristocrat. Miserably rehearsing his wedding lines in a local creepy forest, Victor practises the key moment by slipping the ring over a twig, which releases from the earth a ghostly, ghastly “corpse bride” voiced – of course – by Bonham Carter.
12. Sleepy Hollow (1999)
Burton found an almost classically supernatural register for this version of the Washington Irving gothic romance. Depp is Ichabod Crane, the police officer from New York sent at the turn of the 18th century to the obscure village of Sleepy Hollow to investigate panicky reports of a headless horseman. He falls in love with a local woman, played by Christina Ricci who, like HBC and Green, is very much in the mould of the Burton leading lady.
11. Mars Attacks! (1996)
Goofy, broad comedy isn’t precisely Burton’s style – and pastiche of someone else’s is not really him either, as his own authorial signature is usually so foregrounded. But here he sends up cheesy 1950s sci-fi films about alien attacks (the sort of thing Ed Wood might do, in fact) with Jack Nicholson as the grinning president (and Glenn Close as the first lady) faced with a Martian invasion.
10. Dark Shadows (2012)
The original was a campy-scary television show from the US that few in the UK knew or cared about; Burton’s movie adaptation of it didn’t really change that situation too much. Depp plays an exquisite young 18th-century dandy who has a curse put on him by Green’s sexy witch for trifling with her affections. He is condemned to eternal undeadness and wakes up in the 1970s where his baronial mansion is occupied by the messed-up family of his own descendants. Funny stuff from HBC as their live-in psychotherapist.
9. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
Stephen Sondheim is arguably a natural fit for Burton: complex, intricate, forceful and demanding an immersive commitment from the audience. Here is Burton’s production of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, with Depp as the gruesome barber himself, cutting customers’ throats and dumping corpses downstairs so that his partner-in-crime Mrs Lovett (HBC) can turn them into delicious pies. It could be that the human pie flavour is what Burton is always looking for.
8. Batman (1989)
Burton’s take on the Batman mythology in 1989 laid the foundations for the great superhero renaissance of the next century. His caped crusader, played by MichaelKeaton, was brooding, thoughtful and an absolute fit with the noir look that Burton was going for. Yet there is nothing understated or unsubtle about Jack Nicholson’s panto turn as Joker. His crazy laughing-man act was a vivid comic-book barnstormer of a performance.
7. Frankenweenie (2012)
This witty, ingenious spin on the Frankenstein myth was actually a feature-length version of Burton’s 1984 short film: a stop-motion animation that takes place in a world in which somehow everyone has an unhealthy, deathly pallor. A kid called Victor Frankenstein is devastated when his beloved dog Sparky dies in a freak accident. But then Victor digs up the corpse, connects it to electric currents from a thunderstorm and the dog lives again: as Frankenweenie.
6. Big Eyes (2014)
This is the nearest Burton ever came in his movies to showcasing a sophisticated, grownup debate; in this case about art, gender and ownership. Amy Adams plays Margaret Keane, the real-life popular artist from the 50s and 60s who painted kids with big soulful eyes, work praised by Andy Warhol. Christoph Waltz plays her dishonest, domineering husband Walter, who claimed her work as his own. The film considers the fact that if a woman is found to have created these little-girl images, it might be considered obviously motherly and sentimental; but if a man does it, it is obviously somehow questionable, inappropriate or transgressive – in short, artistic. An interesting, underrated film.
5. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)
The critical consensus has rather turned against Burton’s version of Roald Dahl’s novel, with fan-critics apparently assuming that praising it would undermine their fan-loyalty to Mel Stuart’s 1971 version with Gene Wilder. But in fact, Burton’s take is very good, one of his best films, with Depp’s fey, quasi-innocent creepiness making real sense as the strange chocolatier Willy Wonka who permits lucky children with the golden ticket to come into his sweet factory.
4. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985)
Burton’s feature debut was the first and perhaps the only time that one of his movies invited the audience to laugh with and laugh at the infantile weirdness, or even to feel uncomfortable about it, in the service of irony and comedy. This was the film that introduced cinema audiences to Paul Reubens’ squeaky-voiced, bow-tied manchild character Pee-wee Herman, who goes on big adventures to get his stolen bicycle back. It has a fascination of its own: bright, clean, with terrific visual panache – but clearly Burton would go on to feel that Depp was a more congenial alter ego than Reubens.
3. Edward Scissorhands (1990)
Utterly original and distinctive with an unselfconscious strangeness and sadness that continues to entrance Burton fans to this very day. Depp plays what could be the ultimate Burton/Depp role as Edward Scissorhands, a bizarre postmodern Pinocchio figure: a beautiful goth boy, created by a mad inventor (Vincent Price) who left him with scissors instead of hands, so he can’t pick anything up and cuts himself. It’s a weirdly compelling metaphor for a certain type of exotic look: mesmeric but utterly unworldly, unable to do anything. Vulgar satirists might wonder what happens when Edward needs to go to the bathroom, the issue that reportedly caused Tom Cruise to pass on the role.
2. Beetlejuice (1988)
Freaky and surrealistic, this film throws in everything but the kitchen sink, and one of its wacky components is the anarchic demon Betelgeuse, (Keaton): a supernatural disruptive force – part insult comic, part poltergeist – hired by a ghostly dead couple as someone that specialises in “exorcisms of the living”. The couple ask him to expel a living family that have moved in to the house that they bought just before they were killed in an accident. It’s really very odd that a character who on paper should be incidental is the star, but so it is in this amazing ghost train ride.
1. Ed Wood (1994)
It takes a special kind of confidence for any director to make a film about another director, however much of a byword that director is for being awful. But that is what happened with Burton’s masterpiece, which featured Depp giving the performance of his career in this tribute to the great Z-movie maestro of the 1950s: Ed Wood, the schlock king of the fleapit, the pulp preeminence of the drive-in, the man who would somehow cobble together absurd films from the tiniest of budgets, using past-their-best actors. Depp tenderly and intelligently conveys a romanticised version of Wood, the Donald Wolfit of American grindhouse cinema; the actor-manager who persuaded a loyal repertory of supporters to be in or help make his films. Depp’s Wood has an amazingly lovable, never-say-die attitude and a quixotic belief in himself.
