Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children Out on DVD

Dir: Tim Burton 2hrs 7mins (12A)

Another Gothic offering from the wizard of whimsy Everybody Wants Some!! (15)

Richard Linklater’s subtle comedy is a heady nostalgia trip for anyone who came of age in the US in the early 1980s. Centred on a bunch of jocks on a baseball scholarship at a Texas university, the film follows the young men as they get wasted, get laid and get bored, trying to make sense of it all. It’s oddly uneventful, but so controlled and beautifully designed that you need to suspend expectation and enjoy it as a piece of conceptual art. You often feel with Tim Burton “that he is continually remaking the same movie”, said Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent. It’s a feeling that Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, brimful of his trademark Gothic whimsy, does nothing to dispel. The film stars Asa Butterfield as Jake, a Florida teenager who travels to Wales to find the magical orphanage that he has heard about in the fairy stories his grandfather used to tell him. Sure enough, the orphanage exists; the children in it have magical gifts – for example, there’s a girl (Emma) who can float in the air and a boy who’s invisible – and they are all threatened by eyeball-eating monsters. The plot is baffling, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph, and the film is “so swamped by the detail of the fantasy world” it’s hard to grasp what its characters are saying. Thank goodness, then, for Eva Green’s wonderful turn as Miss Peregrine, said Chris Hewitt in Empire. She’s a “quirky delight”. The film also has some breathtaking scenes, said Kevin Maher in The Times, as when Jake walks on a moonlit beach and Emma, attached to the rope he’s holding, floats above him. Alas it is let down by an “appalling” blockbuster-style ending.