For Fans of Tim Burton

Ed Wood is about a talentless optimist who loves movies so purely that he keeps making them despite every signal that he should stop. Burton made it in black and white, at the height of his commercial power, with no obvious commercial logic. The affection is total and unironic. If you want to understand what Burton actually values, this is the film, not the big tentpole gothics. It is the one that most clearly says: being sincere is enough.

Big Fish gets dismissed by people who find Burton too soft in his later work. That misreads it. The film is about the cost of mythologising yourself so completely that your real son cannot reach you. The fantastical set pieces are not escapism; they are the symptom of the problem. When the ending lands, it is because Burton has spent the whole film showing you that stories are both how we love and how we hide. That is not sentimental. That is true.

Bryan Fuller's Pushing Daisies looks and feels like a Burton film, possibly more than some actual Burton films do. The heightened colour palette, the matter-of-fact treatment of death as a domestic inconvenience, the central romance that literally cannot be consummated: it is operating in the same key. It lasted two seasons, which makes it the Ed Wood of television, sincere and undervalued and absolutely itself.

Sleepy Hollow tends to get treated as a stylish genre exercise, a pleasing haunted-house ride. It is more than that. It is Burton at his most rigorous as a visual director, building a world where every frame looks like an illustration from a book you half-remember. The film's cold logic runs deeper than atmosphere: it gives the supernatural a rational explanation, then makes that rational explanation worse than the ghost. That structural move is sharper than anything in the more celebrated entries. It gets overshadowed because it is not warm, and Burton's warmth is what most people are loyal to. But warmth is not all he can do.