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Every Tim Burton Movie, Ranked
Taking stock of the director’s career, from eccentric hits to big-budget misfires.
is perhaps the funniest piece of giddy schlock heartlessness ever committed to film.” Released about six months after Independence Day, this snarling adaptation of the 1960s Topps trading cards came across as an unwitting send-up of that invasion movie’s cheerful, gung-ho, big-spectacle inanity. The thundering Danny Elfman score and the catchy Prince songs, Anton Furst’s gothic production design and Jack Nicholson’s bombastic performance: Batman is bold and giddy, powered by artists who have been allowed to dream big. But if you want to see what he was capable of at the peak of his powers, when he was undermining every aspect of his burgeoning stardom and playing a series of ungainly, awkward sad loners who were just too sensitive for this world, look at this unlikely hit, the film that to this day feels like the purest expression of Burton’s sensibility.
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