TheRetroCritic

Tim Burton returns with Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children , a new movie based on Ransom Riggs' popular Young Adult novel. The plot, which involves monsters, bizarre teenagers, suburbia and time travel certainly seemed like an ideal vehicle for the director. Asa Butterfield is Jake, an ordinary suburban kid who, one night, finds his grandfather (played by Terrence Stamp) dying with both his eyes missing. Following the path outlined by the late old man's bedtime stories, Jake travels to Wales with his father where, supposedly, he would find the school for oddball children he'd heard so much about. Initially disappointed by what he finds, he eventually stumbles upon one of the students who leads him to the school which happens to be purposely stuck in a time loop. Jake meets the rest of the pupils including an invisible boy, a girl who can float, a kid who spits out bees and a super-strong little girl, among others. It's easy to see why Burton would be k

Based on the popular novel comes Ender's Game , your typical boy-meets-girl, boy-becomes-army-commander-against-a-race-of-ant-aliens-in-space story. It certainly took a while for this one to get made but I guess with the success of The Hunger Games , it was only a matter of time before they actually gave it a go. That Ender's Game is a 12A is both surprising and not all that surprising since, although the source material has its brutal moments, studios need to sell it to kids as well as adults so they were never going to bump it up to a 15 or more. Not that the film is devoid of any dark stuff but it's much more implied than it is in-your-face. The young actors are also older than in the book, I understand, thereby making their cruel environment not quite as scary. If you don't know, the film is set 50 years after a war between humans and Formics (alien ant things) and sees a young boy called Ender (Asa Butterfield) get recruited by Harrison Ford's Colonel Graf