Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

For a director who was one of the most creative and inventive working in the business, there’s something inconsequential and bland about Tim Burton’s latest film. It’s a film that tries desperately to evoke the magical anti-realism of his prior works without digging into the characters as fully as he might have two decades ago.

For over a decade, Burton has been on the withering edge of his own empire. Alice in Wonderland, Sweeney Todd, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory were all visually daring, but emotionally vacant, Burton was throwing all of the Burton-esque elements he could in, but forgetting why we fell in love with him with the likes of Beetlejuice, Edawrd Scissorhands, and Batman. He as a visionary, someone who took familiar concepts and became daring and inventive. His list of failures is longer than his list of successes in the last two decades with Big Fish and Frankenweenie his only real accomplishments.

That said, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is almost a return to form for him. The human interactions are stronger, the actors seem more prepared and the inventiveness he once regularly put on display is still largely there. The problem is that his overuse of old techniques, such as the fighting baby dolls, doesn’t embellish the story in any meaningful way. That he’s more concerned about creating an environment than worrying about what he’s putting out there is disconcerting. There were many problems with the narrative and how it works together. I would hope much of this is a result of an inaccurate adaptation, but ultimately the backbone was likely stronger than the resulting production could ever have been.