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Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children | 2016 | PG-13 | - 1.5.3/span>
After the mysterious sudden death of his grandfather (Terence Stamp), a teen boy (Asa Butterfield) follows clues that lead him to a magical estate where young people with special powers can reside. The headmistress (Eva Green) assigns him the task of protecting them from a monstrous villain (Samuel L. Jackson) and his two leagues of minions. Also with Chris O'Dowd, Judi Dench, Eva Purnell, Rupert Everett and Allison Janney. Directed by Tim Burton. [2:07]
SEX/NUDITY 1 - A teen girl and a teen boy kiss for a few seconds. A teen boy kisses a teen girl and later they hold hands. A teen girl and a teen boy nearly kiss in three scenes, but do not.
► A teen girl and a teen boy in a boat remove clothing to shorts and T-shirt and a thick 1940s style wide-strapped tank top for her.
VIOLENCE/GORE 5 - A wheelchair is shown on a shore and we see the body of a dead old blind man lying back on a sharp rock below (no blood is seen); a man accuses a couple of outsiders of having something to do with it.
► A teen boy places a tiny heart into a doll made of a doll's head on a mechanical body that has a lobster claw and a bird talon for arms; it rises and fights with a doll that has a doll head on top of a crab holding a sword and they kick and punch and the crab stabs the other doll, killing it, without blood. A woman kills a Hollow (invisible to all except those with special powers; it has no eyes, has tentacles in its mouth of sharp teeth, and very long, pointy one-finger hands) using a crossbow (no blood is shown). A boy shoots a crossbow several times, missing a Wight (villains that we hear steal the eyes of children and eat them to gain power), but finally hitting a Hollow twice, without blood flow.
► A teen boy picks up a bottle containing a shadowy item and the camera cuts to an army of skeletons marching onto a pier while carrying clubs and knives: they fight with four Hollows that slam skeletons into walls, smashing them to bits while children hit the Hollows with snowballs to make them visible, a Hollow grabs a skeleton by the neck and slams it on the ground several times, skeletons beat Hollows and one skeleton in a chef's hat chops the head in half with a cleaver, making black goop flow toward the camera, skeletons tie up a Hollow and it smashes to the ground (it's dead) and hold a Hollow from a sky ride, dropping it to the ground (it's also dead); CSI people wearing hazmat suits later analyze black goop and a Hollow walks past them.
► A teen girl floating in the air at the end of a rope in an amusement park theater warns Wights to give up attacking children; a Wight holds a young girl under water in a tub and freezes the water, a teen girl uses fire from her hands to melt the ice and the Wight touches her and freezes her (she melts later and is OK), she sets the jacket of another Wight on fire (he removes it and shakes out the fire) and a teen girl with wind-power breath blows the Wight against a wall for several seconds, but he escapes. A female Wight with a cat's tale and furry legs tries to attack children in a balcony, but is knocked off, falling to the floor below, presumably dead; a teen boy picks up a rubbery looking beating heart and puts it into an old mechanical elephant, which stomps a Wight, presumably dead.
► Children find a teen boy and a Wight that has shapeshifted to form a twin of the boy and the two boys argue while another teen boy points a crossbow at them; a roaring Hollow enters and picks up one boy, who changes into the Wight, using its mouth tentacles and drives two tentacles into the screaming Wight's eyes, leaving black eye sockets and it swallows (presumably the eyes), drops the Wight to the floor(it's dead) and the boy shoots the Hollow with a crossbow, killing it (no blood is visible).
► A 20-foot monster (a Hollow) lumbers out of tall grass and a woman shoots at it five times and it falls dead (no blood is shown). A Wight forces several teens and younger children into a parlor and shouts, "Boo!" to frighten them (they all yelp), an elderly woman in the room is thrown backwards through a wall and a snarling Hollow enters pointing its tentacles at a teen boy's eyes, but a crossbow bolt enters form off-screen and hits the creature in the head, killing it (no blood flow is shown); the youth jumps out of an attic window, slides down a wet roof and walks across a long tree limb to escape.
► A teen boy in misty woods finds his grandfather face down and when he turns him over he sees that the man has no eyes as the man grabs him hard by one wrist; the grandfather tells the teen to find an island and dies with a bloody meat fork in one hand and both hands covered in blood. A teen boy in 1943 approaches a bed covered with mosquito netting in an attic and a body is seen on the bed with his eye sockets black; the boy places a small heart into the shirt of the body, which sits up and says, "Do you want to know who killed me?" and flops back down; a woman sees tears on the body's face and hugs the body.
► A Wight in 1943 captures a teen boy and places his hand, which became a large knife, to the boy's throat; he uses the boy to capture a woman, who changes into a bird and flies into a cage as children and teens take up a hoe, a rake, and some clubs to fight the Wight, but give up.
► A teen boy pursues a Wight with a bird to a secret chamber where the boy enters and finds owls, falcons, and pelicans in a large cage; a Wight chops down the entrance door with his hand, which has become a large axe head, and the boy releases the birds that attack the Wight (we hear it wince but see no damage); another bird flies up and claws its face (we see no damage) and the Wight punches the boy in the head, felling him, then in the stomach, knocking him down and the Wight throws the teen into a wall (no injury is seen).
► A dozen men sit around a cage in which another man places a falcon; men don metal helmets attached to the cage by electrical cables and when a switch is thrown lightning bolts come from the cage and the helmets smoke (when the helmets come off, the men have spiky hair and blank white eyes) and the men become Wights.
► Many sheep in an island field lie dead (no blood) and a man accuses a boy, his father and another man of causing the loss, because they are outsiders.
► A car hits a Hollow, but neither the creature nor the car is damaged. Wights and Hollows at an amusement park push many people roughly out of the way. A young girl yelps and rises quickly into the air as she looks up into the camera lens, suggesting something snatched her up. A bird slams into a cave wall and falls, but a teen girl picks it up and takes it home (we cannot see any injury).
► We see children and adults exhibiting a wide range of magical powers: A teen boy with a collection of bottles of fluid with shadowy animal organs in them can resurrect the dead and bring dolls to life; a young girl has a second mouth in the back of her head under her hair and it is full of sharp teeth, so she uses it to eat a turkey leg and to bite an evil woman on the arm (no blood flows); a woman changes into a bird four times; a teen girl floats through the air and wears heavy shoes so she can walk on the ground (she can also control weather and breathe underwater); a teen girl can control fire and when she touches a pub house it burns down (she also heats a tea kettle at home and starts fires in cruise ship engines to propel the craft); a boy is invisible (we see his clothing seeming to run without him while other times, we see objects move seemingly by themselves and in a pub scene he is not clothed and plates fly into walls, breaking loudly); a teen girl is super-strong, lifting a much larger teen boy twice and pulling a 10-foot carrot into a house; a teen boy has a live beehive in his stomach and bees fly out of his mouth or hang onto one side of his face several times; a preteen girl makes plant life grow fast, including a tree limb to use as a bridge, a 10-foot carrot for dinner, and vines to tie up a villain; a teen boy has prophetic dreams (of a teen boy and a teen girl almost kissing) that he projects onto a screen for entertainment. A teen girl blows gale force wind in an underwater room to dry it and she does the same thing later to an entire barnacle-covered cruise ship and it rises from the sea floor.
► A teen boy finds a fence broken at night and he discovers a blood-covered flashlight. A teen boy and his father travel to Wales where the boy finds a burned out mansion.
► A flashback shows a dark stone corridor down which four male Wights push an elderly woman strapped to a two-wheel hand truck; she looks confused and frightened as they push her off-screen to end the scene. A teen boy sees a ghostly man with blank white eyes staring at him in a moving car. A teen boy finds his grandfather's house ransacked and a screen window ripped open. We see a few grainy photos of men with blank eyes and children with black eye sockets. Two teens trick another teen into stepping into deep mud and we hear the mansion was bombed by German aircraft in 1943. Several children approach a teen boy, take him through a cave, and exit in 1943. Children and teens enter a wide fun house door marked with white skulls and glowing eyes to find an amusement park and they walk through the door to a different time. A teen boy travels back and forth through a cave moving from 1943 to 2016.
► A woman and children don gas masks in heavy rain as a plane flies overhead and drops a bomb; the bomb stops in mid-air, as do raindrops; the woman turns back a magic watch by 24 hours to restart the day.
► A grandfather complains that his son took his gun and that he needs it to fight monsters. A man's teen grandson says that the older man has dementia and a coworker of the boy suggests it is Alzheimer's. A woman says that she has a .38 in her car and she gets it. Police say that a fork found in the hand of a man had animal DNA on it. We hear that a woman and several children live the same 24 hours daily in a time loop to avoid a bombing, and they never age. A teen boy asks about a fierce woman, "She's not going to kills anyone is she?" and a teen girl says, "No." A teen boy tells a teen girl, "I can't fight. I can't kill anyone." We hear that a teen boy's grandfather hunted down and killed bad people. A teen boy is forced to see a psychiatrist after the death of his grandfather, when he begins talking about Polish ghost stories his grandfather told him; the boy believes the stories, but his father says the boy has mental health issues. A teen boy and his father argue briefly a few times. We hear that evil creatures killed all the children in a home for the gifted and their headmistress escaped to another timeline.
► We see men eat a pile of eyes from a floor and they eat eyes from a tall Lazy-Susan in a dining table (the eyes have pink nerves attached to them). A preteen girl spits water out on a cruise ship that rises from the sea bottom. On a TV screen, several birds peck at another bird that they seem to be eating, but we see no blood.
LANGUAGE 3 - 3 scatological terms, 4 mild obscenities, name-calling (crazy, insane, idiot, weird, chicken, lunatic, monsters, cockamamie, American), exclamations (what the ..., be quiet), 1 religious profanity (GD), 3 religious exclamations (Oh My God, Thank God, Heaven Knows).
SUBSTANCE USE - A teen boy asks his grandfather if he took his medication and receives no answer. A pub features a bar with beer taps, six men sit at a bar and four of them have pint glasses of beer in front of them, five men sit at a bar and one man drinks beer while another man at a table drinks the last of a glass of beer and sips a second glass of beer, an invisible boy throws a glass of beer smashing into a wall and tosses another beer into the face of a man, and a man in a pub guest room tells his son that he is going downstairs for a drink. A woman smokes a pipe that creates large clouds of smoke in two scenes, and several men hold cigarettes that create large spires of smoke in a couple of pub scenes.
DISCUSSION TOPICS - People who are different, fear of outsiders, gifted children, childhood, adolescence, aging, cynicism, giving up, magical powers, belief, oppression, freedom, threats, danger, jealousy, envy, protection, WWII, courage, sacrifice, relationships, family, love, respect, trust.
MESSAGE - Gifted children are sometimes misunderstood, bullied, and physically harmed by others who are envious of their skills and jealous of the attention they receive.
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CAVEATS
Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.
We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.
Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.
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The Union - 3.5.5
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