Children plays a cruel trick. After the ponderous opening monologue about whether anything you do really matters (this is adapted from a YA novel, after all), the opening is vintage Tim Burton: a splendidly gangly social outcast (Asa Butterfield) gets a panicked call from his beloved, dementia-addled grandpa (Terrence Stamp), and rushes through the humid mists of suburban Florida to help the old man settle down. Except when he gets there, the house is wrecked (there’s a tremendous shot of our hero through the shredded wisps of a ruined screen door) and the chain link fence out back is torn asunder: an ordinary object twisted into the kind of nightmare gateway from cheerful reality to spooky surreality that the director so clearly relishes. Beyond is the darkened, moss-hung swamp, and Grandpa, and...something else. The promise holds through the next act, as Butterfield must wrangle his way to the island where Grandpa grew up, the one full of special children hiding from monsters. But when he gets there, it all goes to pieces in a convoluted story involving time travel, super-powered Peculiars (“It’s a recessive gene”), a Peculiar splinter group, monsters, precious Englishness, monsters, rushed romance, monsters, shoddy plotting and execution, special effects, and monsters. When it could have been about growing up. (2016) — Matthew Lickona
This movie is not currently in theaters.