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Director Tim Burton finds a perfect venue for his brand of weirdness in "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children," a sharp and sometimes magical adaptation of Ransom Riggs' novel.

Jake (Asa Butterfield) is a seemingly normal teen who has grown up on the fantastic stories of his grandfather Abe (Terence Stamp) about children with special powers. After mysterious creatures attack Abe in his Florida retirement park, Jake becomes determined to find out if his stories were true, enlisting his dad (Chris O'Dowd) to take him to Cornwall, England.

It's there that Jake finds the title home, where the bewitching Miss Peregrine (Eva Green) protects her charges — children with such powers as invisibility, fire-starting, super-strength and, in the case of the lovely Emma (Ella Purnell), lighter-than-air buoyancy — by replaying the same day in 1943, just before the Germans bombed the house. But when the home is attacked by evil peculiars called "Hollows," led by the madman Barron (Samuel L. Jackson), Jake must organize the children to fight back.

Riggs' book, cleverly adapted by screenwriter Jane Goldman ("Kingsman: The Secret Service"), is right in Burton's funhouse comfort zone, and he applies bits of stop-motion animation and his other baroque touches. The performers get lost in the special-effects hoopla at times, and it takes an inordinately long time to build up to the meat of the story. Once it gets rolling, though, the movie serves up some oddball delights.

'Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children'

Opens Friday, Sept. 30, at theaters everywhere; rated PG-13 for intense sequences of fantasy action/violence and peril; 127 minutes.