Over the last three decades, Tim Burton has established a curious career, which is fitting for a filmmaker so invested in the unusual. Once the preeminent auteur of gothic outsider angst, Burton's signature stylistic indulgence became both the calling card for his “brand”, so to speak, and its greatest weakness. Burton has always functioned at a somewhat singular middle ground, right on the line of mainstream and niche (hence his Hot Topic popularity), and that unique sensibility has led to a one-of-a-kind career that has established him as a brilliant but inconsistent filmmaker.

The inconsistency can be infuriating and make easy to take the brilliance for granted, but Burton’s work is spellbinding as often as it’s grating, and there’s no way around the fact that he has a singular mind responsible for some of the most inspired, original cinematic landscapes of all time. How can you discount the man who gave us a world as schlock-soaked and unprecedented as Beetlejuice, a film as insanely inventive as Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, or a character as sweetly macabre as Edward Scissorhands? While it’s true that Burton has helmed some real duds in his time, he’s also crafted a handful of truly great films. When Burton is firing on all cylinders, he is a furious force of creativity and vision and there’s simply no one else out there that can do what he does as well as he does it. So let's take a look back on that iconoclastic career through all the highs and lows with Burton's films ranked worst to best below.

17) Alice in Wonderland

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Image via Walt Disney Pictures

Woof. What a drag. What to say about Alice in Wonderland? Lewis Carrol's classic children's tale should be a natural fit for Burton's fantastical sensibilities and fondness for adolescent outcasts, but somehow the film misses the mark to an astounding extent. Perhaps it's the soulless CGI wash or the utter disregard for narrative coherence, or perhaps Burton simply isn't as fitted to the material as logic would suggest, but the final result is a limp adaptation that almost turns the extraordinary into the mundane. Despite hints of inspiration, the so-called Wonderland is strikingly short on wonders.

Which is not to say the film doesn't deliver dazzling visuals, they just don't add up to anything. The ideation of Wonderland's landscape is aesthetically pleasing, but it never inspires more than a surface-level appreciation. Worse yet, the characters themselves are by-and-large a bit bland, which is perhaps the greatest offense to the source material. You do not believe that this Alice believes even a single impossible thing before breakfast. You do not believe the Mad Hatter is truly mad, indeed it's a prime example of Johnny Depp's turn toward caricature over character, making for a sad but silly man who never lives up to his name. The highlight is Helena Bonham Carter's delightful turn as the ever-screaming Queen of Hearts, and perhaps that's because it's the element where Burton's fingerprints are most obvious. Carter's Queen isn't just volatile and murderous, she's overcompensating for her insecurities as a malformed oddity. But that clever spin on the odd and outcast is sorely missing from the rest of the proceedings, as is any trace of soulfulness or inspiration, leaving a pretty but petty adaptation that underserves its Carrol's world of wonders and nonsense.

16) Planet of the Apes

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To put it bluntly, Burton's Planet of the Apes remake is total misfire. And perhaps strangest of all, it feels like it could have been directed by anyone. You can barely even feel Burton's fingerprints (which are usually so evident) on the uninspired actioner. Instead, it's overwhelmingly generic, thematically bankrupt, and visually unpleasant to look at. And then there's the issue of the cast. While it makes sense to put your most talented actors under heavy prosthetics, knowing that they have the skills to tackle the challenge, it almost seems as if Burton actively sought out the worst possible performers for his human characters. Mark Wahlberg is wooden and possibly the least charming he's even been as the hero of the piece, an air force astronaut who lands on a planet where apes are the overlords and humanity has become their subjects, and gorgeous though she may be, it's all too easy to see why Estella Warren's studio prospects dried up after what was touted as her breakout role (though I'm sure Kangaroo Jack didn't help either).

Burton seems to be attempting to channel those B-movie sensibilities that made Mars Attacks! such a fun watch, but Planet of the Apes has none of the panache and personality that made Mars Attacks! work. What it does have is a shoddy script, humdrum world-building, and a chaffing final twist that acts as the mortal blow for an already grating retread of a sci-fi great. Burton deserves some credit for avoiding the temptation to simply reproduce the original film, but his career has consistently proved, originality alone just isn't enough.

15) Dark Shadows

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Image via Warner Bros.

Dark Shadows is the nadir of Burton and Depp's long-standing collaboration, which might be why they haven't reunited since it dropped back in 2012. There are elements in Dark Shadows that hint at a better movie hiding behind the nonsense, but they are only glimmers, and faint ones at that. The overwhelming bigger picture is that of a complete mess and a team of creatives who appear to be barely trying at all. As Barnabas Collins, a once-prominent lord cursed to vampirism by the woman he spurned (Eva Green), Depp is nothing but a bundle of tics and scenery-chewing hamishness. Likewise, Helena Bonham Carter appears to be simply hitting her marks (though she's talented enough to make that look better than lesser actors), Bella Heathcote might actually be sleep-waking through the film, Michelle Pfeiffer and Chloe-Grace Moretz essentially have nothing to do, and while Eva Green is a powerful on-screen presence as Barnabas' tormenter Angelique, Burton seems intent on channeling her energy into an unbridled caricature that makes her unruly obsession with Barnabas utterly nonsensical. (Not to mention the fact that their complete lack of chemistry makes the ridiculous sex scenes brutally cringe-worthy.)

The biggest flaw, however, is the story, which satisfies neither fans of the original series nor the uninitiated. There’s promise in this small-town rivalry, in Angelique's destructive, all-consuming lust, and in the mysteries of the supernatural magic at work, but nothing ever comes to fruition. Threads are left dangling, or introduced at random (like lycanthropy, because sure! Why not?). Bonham Carter has the most relatable, human storyline, an aging woman desperate to uncover the secrets to Barnabas' immortality, but she’s quickly dispatched and dismissed, all for nothing but a pre-credits punchline. It’s also, and this is unusual for Burton, just kind of an ugly movie with visuals so reductive you get the sense that the aesthetically inspired director may have reached the bottom of his creative well (fortunately, Frankenweenie came along later that year to prove he’s still got it with the right material). Ultimately, Dark Shadows is an unfortunate misfire -- it's so weird, it should be fun, but instead it's tonally off-balance, narratively mangled, and visually mediocre.

14) Corpse Bride

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Image via Warner Bros.

Corpse Bride is some of the minor-est of minor Burton. It is simply too meh to bear. After a decade of receiving the lion's share of credit for the Henry Sellick-helmed Nightmare Before Christmas (Burton conceived it but was too busy with Batman Returns to direct), Burton finally directed his own stop-motion saga to middling, rather forgettable results. It suffers for the fact that it plays like a collection of greatest hits, but the real problem is the story, which gives you absolutely no reason to care about anybody. Johnny Depp's protagonist is a non-character who merely bumbles in and out of opportunities and consequences. Meanwhile, Helena Bonham Carter's titular Corpse Bride is one of the most inactive, unintelligent movie characters in recent memory. Betrayed by her betrothed on the night of their wedding, her great afterlife plan is to simply sort of lay there in the dirt until someone comes along and proposes to her. And then gets all hurt and offended when the mortal man in love with another woman (I guess "in love" since they literally just met) doesn't want to give up his whole life for the underworld. It's a special sort of stupid and it makes it impossible to invest in any of the action.  Even Danny Elfman's score feels half-hearted and uninspired, almost as if he's plagiarizing his own previous work, without a single song or composition moment that truly hits the mark.

However, if Corpse Bride has a saving grace, it's the gorgeous stop-motion animation from LAIKA (done on-contract before they officially opened their doors as a standalone studio). While Burton's vision for the underworld isn't exactly revelatory (it's mostly a bunch of skeletons in a wash of green and purple light), the animation itself is quite spectacular and an exciting early glimpse at the greatness the burgeoning stop-motion studio would go on to achieve. Animation aside, Corpse Bride fizzles out as soon as it begins, an uninspired pastiche of Burton's greater work that, for all its visual impact, never grabs a narrative foothold.

13) Mars Attacks!

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Image via Warner Bros.

If Burton is often guilty of style over substance, Mars Attacks! is all style, no substance. The title is literally the plot of the film. Martians show up on earth. Then they attack. That’s it. That’s the movie. It’s not bad, in fact, it’s pretty fun, it’s just not much. Fortunately, if style's all you got, Mars Attacks! has got it in spades. A doting spoof and homage to 1950s alien invasion pics, it's pure B-movie schlock and surprisingly sadistic. As the Martians stage their no-prisoners invasion, Burton relishes in finding new ways to dispatch and torment his earthlings, which are played by an insanely impressive cast including Natalie Portman, Glenn Close, Michael J. Fox, Jack Black, Anette Benning, and Jack Nicholson.

But this movie isn’t about the acting, and most of them end up without all much to do. The political satire is on-the-nose and the plot…wait just kidding, there isn’t really a plot, and without a narrative to hold things together, it's the top-notch production value that ends up being the real star of the film. Spectacle isn’t enough to be great, but in this case, it’s enough to be good enough thanks to how Burton lovingly harkens back to the films that so obviously influenced him as a nascent filmmaker.

12) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

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Image via Warner Bros.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory gets a lot right, but what it gets wrong cripples the film so completely that no amount of stunning imagery and creative reinterpretation can fully salvage it. What it gets wrong above all, and what it can never recover from, is the character of Willy Wonka, the outcast candyman responsible for the film’s world of wonders. You can’t top Gene Wilder’s iconic performance, so it’s easy to understand why Burton completely reenvisioned the character, but Johnny Depp plays him in such broad strokes that he becomes something closer to a parody than a character. Maybe the biggest affront to the character is that Burton and Depp want to have it both ways with the character — he’s a sinister, cruel teacher to bad children (and it’s hinted more than once that he’s utterly unconcerned if they make it out alive) but he’s also a wounded man-child who’s supposed to earn audience sympathy.

But when it comes to reinvention, the rest of the film mostly hits the mark. The scenes between Charlie and his family play beautifully, and Burton’s take on Wonka’s chocolate factory is a stunning display of literally candy-colored terrain — the kind of visually resplendent fantasy-world that can thrill the younger, CGI-raised generation. I’ll also go to bat for Burton’s weird (like, really weird) creative calls on the Oompa Loompa’s musical numbers. They’re creepy and bizarre, and I can’t think of a single thing I’ve seen like them before. While Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s incarnation of Willy Wonka is an utter failure (or an “insult”, as Wilder called it), you have to commend Burton’s dedication to fully realizing his reinvented world.

11) Pee-Wee's Big Adventure

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Image via Warner Bros.

As Burton’s feature film debut, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure is a bit of an oddity on his resume, but a fine showcase of the inventive world-building he would come to be known for. Centered on Paul Reubens' stand-up character Pee-Wee Herman, a consummate man-child with a theatrical flair and a continuous case of the giggles, Burton tackled the task of turning this bizarre, bleating character creation into a feature film, and against all odds he succeeded.

That success comes out of stylistic commitment to a cartoonish zeal and the fact that Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is essentially a funhouse in film form. When Pee-Wee's beloved bicycle goes missing, he heads out in search of the culprit on a wild, winding road trip that takes him from the Alamo, to the passenger seat of a fugitive's convertible, to the Warner Bros. Lot in Burbank, California and all the while Pee-Wee just giggles and guffaws and clowns it up, no matter what life throws at him. Pee-Wee is a bit of an idiot and a clown, but that's part of his charm, and you can't help but be won over by his unerring love for life and its adventures, no matter what comes his way. Burton shows incredible command in his first film, especially dealing with such an unusual, unruly character, and introduced himself to the film world as a voice to watch for those who want a cinematic experience unlike any they had seen before.

10) Big Eyes

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The fact that Big Eyes falls into such a middling spot on the list speaks to the number of solid films the sometimes brilliant but inconsistent filmmaker has made over his career. It's a perfectly good film, not extraordinary but entirely enjoyable and compelling. The films centers around the famous art-world fraud of Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz) who achieved the success, wealth, and fame he always craved with portraits of bug-eyed, sad-faced waifs. The only problem is, he didn't paint them. That would be his wife Margaret (Amy Adams), who found herself conned by her spouse, horrified as his lies unfolded and, too meek to take a stand, finds herself trapped in the ruse along with him. As Margaret, Adams delivers a quietly beautiful performance and as Walter, Waltz’s peculiar sleazy charisma is perfectly put to use, making it easy to understand how Margaret fell under his thrall, and subsequently struggled so hard to escape it.

For the true life tale, Burton tones down his stylistic tendencies to perhaps the most subtle they've ever been, a wise move that respects the reality of Margaret's experience and proves that he can celebrate oddity without lavishing in aesthetic. It's also one of his most grounded takes on the outcast experience finding a woman who is societally shunned not for disfigurement or awkwardness, but because she had the mendacity to demand a divorce in a time when such things were simply not accepted. It’s one of his most mature works and a promising return to form for a director who meandered in adolescence so long he overlooked his potential as an adult storyteller.

9) Frankenweenie

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Image via Disney

Burton's story about a boy and his undead pup stuck with the director from the very beginning of his career, and as a result it has the kind of endearing intimacy that only comes from such a labor of love. First realized as a short film before his feature film debut, Burton returned to the charming re-interpretation of Mary Shelley's seminal horror tale with the feature-length stop-motion film in 2012. Filmed entirely in black and white, and packing in a number of horror references, Frankenweenie has a fun B-movie feel that pervades the film, but it also has a big, tender beating heart that elevates it beyond the clever concept and singular visuals.

Following the young Victor Frankenstein, Frankenweenie flirts with meditations on grief and mortality when Victor's beloved dog Sparky is hit by a car and Victor upends god and science to bring him back from the dead. Unfortunately, the heartfelt narrative takes a back seat in the back half of the when Victor's life-giving invention sweeps his small town, unleashing undead madness, and the sweet simplicity of the story evolves into an all-out monster mash. It's a move that somewhat undermines the film's deeper themes of loneliness and isolation, but even with the third-act animated bonanza, Frankenweenie remains one of Burton's most intimate, touching movies, and a refreshing return to form in his inconsistent late-phase.

8) Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

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Image via DreamWorks

Sweeney Todd is Tim Burton at his most vicious and violent, with nary a trace of whimsy to be found. Adapting from the famed Stephen Sondheim musical, Sweeney Todd follows Johnny Depp as the titular Demon Barber of Fleet Street -- a man recently released from years of wrongful imprisonment who returns to the streets of London on a mission of revenge. The target of his vengeance is the nefarious Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who sent him to prison, robbing him of his life with his beautiful wife and infant daughter, but he racks up an impressive body count along the way. When he meets Helena Bonham Carter's Mrs. Lovett, the local pie-maker who's hard up for good meat, things take a turn for the brutally bloody as the two devise a system wherein Todd murders the men who come to him for a quick shave and sends them down to Mrs. Lovett's oven.

As Burton's tried and true collaborators, Depp and Bonham Carter are in fine form as the deranged duo, honoring the tragedy of Sondheim's material and relishing in his clever turns of phrase (even if they're not quite up to the vocal challenge of fully realizing his musical genius). Burton directs the film as a pitch-dark Grande Guignol drama, leaning into Mrs. Lovett's desperate loneliness and Todd's tragic turn towards the sinister. While his trademark stylistic flourish is evident, it's not overblown, and in fact, fits hand-in-glove with Sondheim's vision of gritty, grimy Victorian London. Burton also has an impressive command of staging musical action, using the advantages and freedom of the cinematic medium to bring Todd's grizzly throat-slashing deeds to life in torrents of bright red blood. Sweeney Todd is Burton's most macabre entry to date, but he never lets the bloodshed become too bleak to bear, and demonstrates that his gift for genre is the way that he bends them, whether musicals or superheroes, to his sensibilities rather than the other way around.

7) Batman

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Image via Warner Bros.

In the post-Nolan, post-MCU superhero-dominated entertainment landscape we live in, it can be easy to take for granted what Burton achieved when Warner Bros. handed him the keys to the world's most popular superhero. It's important to remember the context -- the fact that Batman's previous on-screen incarnations had always been campy bam-pow fun, and the fact that it was only Burton's third film. Entrusted with a major franchise (even before superheroes became the driving box office force), Burton applied his sensibilities to all of Batman's iconography, creating a darker image for the hero that undoubtedly helped pave the way for the gritty, hyper-realistic greatness of Nolan's trilogy. But Burton isn't invested in realism or grit, but fantasy and intrigue. He embraces the title of World's Greatest Detective giving Batman a noir flourish and letting Michael Keaton's Bruce Wayne essentially play the offbeat everyman -- just with an extraordinary bankroll and a tragic past. Burton's thematic dedication to the bizarre folks of the world is subtler here, but ever-present in the way that Bruce is both isolated by his wealth and damaged by the murder of his parents. Danny Elfman is on top form here as well, creating the kind of instantly identifiable score that transports you right into Burton's visionary world.

Burton builds Gotham into a gothic metropolis, but by his usual standards it's remarkably restrained and straight-faced, the most outlandish flourishes reserved for Jack Nicholson's giddily sinister spin on The Joker. Through the Crown Prince of Crime, Burton ushers waves of pastels and neon into his grim, gray Gotham as an appropriately insane injection of anarchy. However, despite the excellent world building, characters, and performances, the film definitely has some narrative flaws. The most obvious and egregious being the ham-fisted reveal that it was the Joker (as a young gangster) who murdered Bruce's parents. There are also some pacing issues and lulls as Burton moves from one imaginative set-piece to the next, but his reinvention of Batman's iconic world is more than enough to carry the film through its rough patches.

6) Sleepy Hollow

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Image via Paramount

Sleepy Hollow is style over substance, but that's easy enough to forgive when the style is so damn good. Adapted from Washington Irving's classic tale of the murderous headless horseman tormenting the titular town of Sleepy Hollow, Burton reframes the story of the legendary apparition through his gothic lens and it's a match made in heaven. Burton amps up the violence a bit, making for moments of gruesome horror in the midst of the eerie mystery, especially when it comes to Christopher Walken's performance as the Hessian Horseman behind the apparition. His shocks of white hair and razor-sharp teeth make for an unforgettable, haunting image. Johnny Depp also delivers an excellent turn as the neurotic, science-minded Ichabod Crane with all the supporting players that fill out the town around him fulfilling their roles dutifully. The result is a film that feels like the spirt of a foggy Halloween night translated into cinema.

Part of that ambiance is born out of the the fact that Sleepy Hollow is absolutely gorgeous thanks to the tremendous technical skill of Burton's crew. Colleen Atwood's costumes are rich and ornate, some of her finest work in their long-standing collaboration, and that attention to detail is manifested in every element of Sleepy Hollow's world-building. As an example, Burton built the town of Sleepy Hollow from scratch, an excellent production decision that gives the film's setting a completely distinct, one-of-a-kind look feel. And it's all shot with the kind of refined beauty that could only come from a visionary cinematographer like Emmanuel Lubezki. Pick a frame from Sleepy Hollow, and more often than not it could stand on its own as a still picture, a testament to the integrity of production value and artistry on display.

5) Big Fish

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Image via Columbia Pictures

Big Fish is a sweeping, sentimental, and playful film about mortality, legacy, and the enduring desire to know where we come from before we know where we’re going. Boasting one of Burton’s most outstanding casts, which interestingly includes very few of his repeat collaborators, Big Fish is framed over two overlapping narratives which follow Ed Bloom, a man of many words and worldly tales. Albert Finney plays Ed in his old age, a man on his deathbed whose tales of splendor have become a source of contention between him and his son, played by Billy Crudup, who feels he has never truly known his father because he has only known him through his fantastical interpretation of the past. As Ed spins the wild narrative of his youth, those incredible stories unfold on screen with Ewan McGregor lighting up the screen as his youthful counterpart.

Burton makes a lot of smart calls here, knowing exactly when to lay the style on thick and exactly when to pull it back. When in the midst of Ed’s grandiose tales, Burton lights his passion for imaginative set pieces to full blaze, but when in the present, where a family is dealing with the intimate immediacy death, Burton plays it straight to tear-jerking effect. The beauty of Big Fish (beyond the gorgeous imagery, which finds Burton at his most colorful and playful), is found in the story of a father and son’s struggle to understand and accept each other, a generational divide that is only bridged with the acceptance that history is always a combination of fact and fiction, and while truth is plain, there is a lot to love about the dreamer and storytellers of the world who turn the mundane into the dazzling.

4) Batman Returns

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Image via Warner Bros.

Batman Returns is not only one of Burton's best films -- a prime example of the dark comedic wonders he summons when at the top of his craft -- it's also one of the best Batman movies of all time. For his Batman follow-up, Burton takes the singular iteration of Gotham he introduced in the first film and infuses it even more of his flair for spectacle, most evident in the figures of Danny DeVito's Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman. Penguin is a disgusting oddity; a nose-chomping, black-toothed monstrosity inside and out, who climbs the ranks to become Gotham's mayoral candidate in a piece of charming political satire. Meanwhile, Pfeiffer steals the show as Catwoman, nee Selina Kyle, intensely alluring and endearingly playful despite being batshit bonkers – neither fact Bruce Wayne and/or Batman can overlook. Indeed, their moments together, whether suited up or in civilian clothes make for many of the films highlights, a dance of two people desperately trying to appear normal by day and embracing their deep, dark weirdness by night.

In spite of the iconic iterations of two of Batman's most popular players in his Rogues Gallery, Batman Returns has a few obvious flaws -- too many villains (Christopher Walken is in there too as the horrid Max Schreck, arguably the most nefarious player in the piece), and a resulting scattered narrative -- and for a Batman movie it’s bizarrely light on Batman, who takes a back seat to his spectacular villains. But none of these worries can stop it from being a triumphant force of stylistic synergy – everyone involved is firing on all cylinders – and the result is an absolutely brilliant piece of pop culture cinema, rich with personality and confident command, that fulfills the best in Batman and Burton himself.

3) Edward Scissorhands

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Edward Scissorhands is the perfect merger of Burton’s penchant for spectacle and his unwavering fascination with “the other”. His first collaboration with Johnny Depp was also one of the first to give the young actor and opportunity to step out of his heartthrob role — an opportunity Depp fully embraced with a tender, sensitive performance as the incomplete creation of a brilliant inventor. Burton’s spin on the Frankenstein tale is so sweet and full of wonder, a fairy-tale tinged fable and a gorgeous demonstration of the lovely gentleness that makes his most heartfelt films so endearing.

As Edward, Depp is the tragic creation of a late scientist, desperately lonely and locked away until the local cosmetic saleswoman Peg (the eternally sympathetic Diane Wiest) knocks on his door, shows him kindness, and brings him down to the small suburban town she calls home. There, Edward is an outcast but also a source of fascination among the picket-fence set. Instead of hands, Edward has two sets of deadly sharp foot-long knives, a "deformity" that keep him in constant physical isolation, but also make him a prodigiously talented craftsman of unusual lawn-hedges and high-fashioned hair cuts. Before long, the town is recreated in his image, but when he’s framed for a crime, he finds that the townsfolk who were so quick to turn his oddity to their advantage, are equally quick to judgment and condemnation. Along the way, he also strikes up a quasi-amorous relationship with Winona Ryder’s winsome, kind-hearted Kim, which is a lovely tragi-romantic side tangent, but at its heart, Edward Scissorhands is about how that which makes us special also makes us different and the fact that oddity is easily fetishized, but rarely accepted.

2) Beetlejuice

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Image via Warner Bros.

Burton's second film demonstrates all his best qualities with a verve and exuberance that has rarely been matched since -- his cartoonish sense of humor, his appreciation for morbid wonders, his aesthetic flair and ingenuity, and the sentimental strain that underlies it all. Beetlejuice has got it all, and it's got it in spades. The film follows Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin as Barbara and Adam Maitland, a loving couple living the quiet life when they wake up one day to realize they've died, and outside of the confines of their home, the world around them has disappeared in lieu of a hellish landscape of sand serpents. When a new family moves into their home, the gaudy Deetzes and their spooky-meets-angsty teenage daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder), Barbara and Adam are dead set on getting the irksome intruders out of their home no matter what it takes. And what it might just take is the "bio-exorcist" Beetlejuice, Michael Keaton's manic, head-spinning, crotch-honking undead prankster and exorcist of the living.

It's about as original of a twist on the haunting genre you could ask for, wherein the dead are haunted by the living and tormented by wearisome underworld bureaucracy, including a lengthy, tedious handbook for the undead. The set-pieces are wonderfully imaginative and beautifully bizarre, perhaps the most iconic moment coming early, when Barbara and Adam possess the Deetzes, turning them into a musical marionette show set to the tune of Harry Belafonte's 'Banana Boat Song', writhing around bug-eyed and bewildered as they six foot, seven foot, eight foot, BUNCH! And that forceful thrust of creativity never wanes. Burton directs Keaton to an iconic performance for the ages, and each new set, sequence, and character is rendered with affectionate creativity and care. In Burton's lesser films, that tendency manifests as a naval-gazing preciousness, but in his finest films, Beetlejuice among them, it makes for a formidable force of inventiveness.

1) Ed Wood

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Image via Beuna Vista Pictures

There's really no reason Ed Wood should work as well as it does but for the strange magic of Burton's cinematic vision and passion for the unkempt, unruly, and unwanted characters of the world. Centered around the life of the prolific but mediocre B-movie filmmaker best known for Plan 9 from Outer Space, Ed Wood stars Johnny Depp in what is his most nuanced and human performance under Burton's guidance. And while Ed Wood came long before Depp was widely recognized for his comedic talents, Burton had the foresight to mine those talents for all they're worth as his titular inventor of weird and unwatched cinema.

Burton crafts Ed Wood's narrative as an ode to cinema and artistic tenacity, exploring all of Wood's kinks and quirks (namely, he was a straight man with a devout predilection for dressing in women's clothes, especially a good angora sweater) with an affectionate and attentive respect for the kindred spirit filmmaker who so obviously influenced him. He surrounds his kooky creator with set of equally unusual players, bringing out the singular beauty (or ugliness behind the beauty) in each. Perhaps most impressive, Burton's style here is remarkably restrained, shot in simple black and white, letting the peculiarity of his characters do the heavy lifting without relying on stylistic flourish and embellishment. While Burton has built beautiful, bizarre worlds throughout his career, his most impressive work comes in honoring the beautiful and bizarre that exists within all people, even the ones who never quite find their place in the real world.