12. “Big Fish” (2003)
The first of Burton’s two Oscar-Baity-Films-Beginning-With-The-Word-Big, “Big Fish” is a thoroughly decent film. It’s well acted and even moving at its core, and for the most part Burton resists the temptation to bury it in heightened design work, but it never adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Adapted by John August from Daniel Wallace’s novel, the film follows Will Bloom (Billy Crudup), who attempts to dig into the web of fantastical stories and tall tales told by his elderly, estranged father (Albert Finney, with Ewan McGregor playing the character as a young man) in an attempt to get to know him before he passes. It’s genuinely charming in places and has a few memorable sequences, but while some of the casting is inspired (Alison Lohman is eerily appropriate as a young Jessica Lange), McGregor can’t quite capture Finney’s twinkle, and Crudup’s left adrift by Burton’s palpable disinterest in the present day sequences. More crucially, it’s just too featherlight in tone to make an impact —it’s hard not to imagine what Steven Spielberg (who was long attached to the project) or even Jean-Pierre Jeunet might have accomplished with the same material. Then again, the story ultimately ends up feeling too neat, shying away from the messiness of life just when it threatens to get close to it.
11. “Mars Attacks!” (1996)
It’s an expensive hotchpotch of a film (apparenty the only thing its inflated $100m budget couldn’t stretch to was a story) but unlike other such titles in Burton’s latter-day catalogue, “Mars Attacks” has individual elements that are so much fun they almost compensate for its lack of cohesion. Chief among them is Jack Nicholson, returning after his unprecedented payday for “Batman” (on which he negotiated a back-end deal and pocketed a cool $60m) in a showy, contrasting dual role as the beleaguered U.S. President and an oleaginous, reptilian, unscrupulous, orange-tanned developer (and if you basically combine those two roles you get a glimpse of a potential future should a certain real-life orange-tanned property magnate win a certain election). Ably backed up by a fabulously eclectic, high-brow/lowbrow cast in Annete Bening, Glenn Close, Pierce Brosnan, Sarah Jessica Parker, Danny DeVito, Martin Short, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J. Fox, Rod Steiger, Tom Jones, Lukas Haas, Natalie Portman, Sylvia Sidney and a striking Lisa Marie Smith in a mute role, the film is such a loving homage to the sci fi B-movies of the 1950s that it also imports their flaws — flabbiness and disposability. But for its impressive body count, often eye-popping candy coloured design and no-scenery-left-unchewed performances it’s also kind of a blast. From a ray-gun, perhaps.
10. “Corpse Bride” (2005)
A darkly hued animated film co-directed by Burton and Mike Johnson, “The Corpse Bride,” is a Russian folktale given a creaky Hammer Horror/creature feature/Gothic melodrama overlay, stop-motion/claymation style. In it, a young man (voiced by Johnny Depp) is set to be wed (to Emily Watson) but, getting cold feet, flees into the forest, where he accidentally slips and places his wedding ring on the finger of a zombie-ish corpse bride (Helena Bonham Carter). The bride has a tragic backstory (as recited in the wonderful “Remains of the Day” musical number) – she was conned and married a criminal who then robbed and murdered her – which adds even more darkness to a movie that could already only tenuously be described as a “kid’s movie.” Somewhat inevitably never escaping the long, ghoulish shadow cast by beloved Halloween classic “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (which Burton wrote but did not direct over a decade prior), “Corpse Bride” does however reward a rewatch these days. Its melancholic mood and acerbic commentary on the institution of marriage make it feel perennially topical, even if small kids are likely to be bored whenever they’re not freaked out — certainly until that lovely climax where the undead creatures invade the land of the living at the wedding finale.
9. “Batman” (1989)
It’s now been so eclipsed by Christopher Nolan’s beloved take on The Dark Knight that it’s hard to recall just what a lightning bolt Tim Burton’s first “Batman” film was — a bona fide phenomenon, with its inescapable iconography (was there a single lunchbox that didn;t sport the yellow-and-black bat symbol sticker?) and a hot streak at the box office that seemed to last for years. But as the film aged, although it contains a delightfully hammy Jack Nicholson performance, its flaws have magnified. It’s very thinly plotted and surprisingly bland, like Burton’s freak flag is flying at half-mast. Michael Keaton seems square-pegged into a restrictively straight role as Bruce Wayne/Batman, especially considering his previous, off-the-wall turn in “Beetlejuice.” And even Burton’s trademark Gothic design is minimized in favor of a more plasticky aesthetic (though it’s still about a billion times more impressive than the synthetic excesses of the Joel Schumacher era). Still that very un-kinkiness is doubtless what propelled it to such massive success (its less compromised sequel did not perform as well) and the deeply odd Prince soundtrack and Nicholson’s outsize turn make “Batman,” for all its flaws, feel like a model of eccentric vision compared to the identikit superhero blockbusters of today.
8. “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street” (2007)
Though he’s an undisputed master of Broadway, Stephen Sondheim’s work has proven rather resistant to successful screen adaptation, “West Side Story” (which he only wrote the lyrics for) aside — its darkness, its complexity, its failure to adhere to traditional song-and-dance beats has thwarted many over the years. Tim Burton’s “Sweeney Todd,” his lone full-on musical to date, isn’t perfect, but it’s easily one of the best Sondheim movies, and maybe Burton’s most underrated work. As the vengeful barber out to murder the men responsible for the death of his wife, and team-up with a pie-shop owner who really doesn’t care where her meat comes from, Burton’s most frequent collaborators Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter do some of their best work with him here. The former requires you to get past his odd Bowie-pastiche voice, but once you do, it’s the best work of his post-Jack Sparrow era, insular and intense, while Bonham Carter breaks your heart without ever quite excusing the character’s actions. And Burton uses familiar influences — German expressionism, Hammer Horror, Jacobean tragedy — in a far more effective way than usual. It’s a bit one-note in its darkness, and John Logan’s script inexplicably drops the best number, the ominous “The Ballad Of Sweeney Todd,” but it’s worth revisiting if you dismissed it first time around.
7. “Frankenweenie” (2012)
Amidst the disappointments that Burton’s made in recent years — the same year as “Dark Shadows,” one of his worst films — came an unexpected bright spot in “Frankenweenie,” a movie that unfairly stands as his lowest-grossing wide release, but one that we hope will stand well to the test of time. Adapted from the short film that helped to make Burton’s name of the same name by Burton’s go-to writer of the 00s, John August, the stop-motion black-and-white (and 3D!) movie tells the story of a young boy, Victor (Charlie Tahan), who, heartbroken after his beloved dog, Sparky, is run over, finds a way to reanimate him. With hugely effective monochrome look and giant monsters, the film effectively homages classic B-movies and Universal horror, making it more reminiscent of “Ed Wood” than, say, “Corpse Bride,” and August’s screenplay just about manages to stop the story from feeling over-extended at just under 90 minutes. It’s one of his most emotionally impactful films too, tapping into something universal in a way that the director’s most recent films have too often shied away from, and it’s intermittently genuinely moving as a result. To some extent, it feels like a minor work, but if this is what Burton’s minor work is like these days, we’ll take it over the major.