While there are fun moments, the whole is an odd mix of grotesquerie and cutesiness.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 27, 2015

The best Lucas film in 25 years: funny, idiosyncratic, hippy-dippy, packed with creatures and visions worth beholding.

| Feb 2, 2015

By the time the film's ending upends traditional conventions with its unlikely couplings, you're too distracted to fully appreciate the chutzpah, instead cringing at the opening chords of "Wild Thing."

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jan 29, 2015

Strange Magic plunges directly into its convoluted plot without pausing to create a reason viewers should care about any of the characters going through the convolutions.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Jan 26, 2015

The moral of the story is that looks don't matter. But in animation, looks do matter, and even a sweet romance and fun tunes cannot overcome the clunkiness of its design.

| Original Score: C | Jan 24, 2015

It instantly rates as one of the most dismal animations ever released under the Disney umbrella.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Jan 23, 2015

Strange Magic isn't very magical, but it sure is strange.

| Jan 23, 2015

If you're a hardcore animation person with not-very-demanding children you might take a chance.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 23, 2015

Said to be inspired by "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the film plays more like "Avatar" scored to a karaoke competition.

| Jan 22, 2015

A noxious cauldron of ingredients that shouldn't have been mixed: fairies, Shakespeare and classic rock.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jan 22, 2015

"Strange Magic," the new animated musical fairy tale from the mind and the mixtape of George Lucas, is indeed strange. What's missing is the magic.

| Jan 22, 2015

A jaw-droppingly terrible animated musical that mismatches George Lucas' inane story about a pair of fairy princesses to an oddball selection of the "Star Wars'' creator's favorite pop tunes.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jan 22, 2015

Makes The Phantom Menace look like The Empire Strikes Back.

| Original Score: 2/10 | Jan 22, 2015

The plot movement feels very much like an unpleasant formality, shoved forward by tiresome devices.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jan 22, 2015

Strange Magic is strange all right, but hardly magical.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 22, 2015

The movie maintains its own level of oddball invention that at least feels pleasantly removed from the grind of big-studio cartoon manufacturing. At times, it's surprisingly messy for a mainstream animated feature.

| Original Score: B- | Jan 22, 2015

The eerie wood was exquisitely designed. Disastrously, what goes on there suggests a Californian mall during spring break.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jan 21, 2015

As juvenile and frivolous a wish-fulfillment fantasy as one might expect from the visionary behind the lightsaber and Princess Leia hogtied to Jabba the Hut.

| Original Score: .5/4 | Jan 21, 2015

Strange Magic is rambunctious without being lively -- and "magical" without being very magical.

Full Review | Jan 21, 2015

A shrill, garish hodgepodge of familiar elements from other animated vehicles (most evidently 2013's Epic), there's virtually nothing about this forced, fractured fairy tale that feels remotely fresh or involving.

| Jan 21, 2015