Burton's best-looking film

Rating: 7/10 (21 November 1999)

Dark, stylish, disturbing. Tim Burton lives to make movies according to these adjectives. However, Sleepy Hollow seems to be his masterpiece. The legend surrounding the Headless Horseman is the perfect tale for Burton's oddball, surreal direction. As with all his films, the setting is an indispensable character. Whether it's the Gothic underworld of Gotham City or the pastel-colored, surbubia found in Edward Scissorhands; Burton creates a world that lingers in the mind of viewers long after the film is over.
Longtime Burton collaborator Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci shine as Constable Ichabod Crane and Katrina Van Tessel, even while delivering dated, kitschy lines. However, Depp's perfomance is an ingenious blend of childishness and stoicism, of comedy and terror that shines and fits Burton's puerile nightmare perfectly. In a movie that stretches from Batman's cartoon-like violence to scenes of decapitation, animal mutilation and medieval torture, by far Burton's darkest, there is still a sense of mystical fantasy of childlike wonder which keeps even the most horrific scenes from becoming too offensive.
The only negative criticism I have to offer about this movie is some of the cornball dialogue uttered by the main characters, and the contrived story that seems to fall together all too quickly at the end. It's as though Burton tries his hand at a Hercule Poirot mystery without letting the audience in on it. Thus, the conclusion seems to come and go without stopping to be understood.
However, if nothing else, the profound production design is more than worth the price of admission and is guaranteed to hold you prisoner under its hypnotic spell. 7.5/10