It could be because of deviations from the source, the film's bland visual style that’s just unambitious enough to be annoying, or the unengaging story, but “The Amazing Maurice” is, well, less-than-amazing.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 3, 2023

What should be a cute story about a mischievous orange tabby cat instead becomes an ironic, even vaguely smug movie in the vein of something like “Deadpool.”

| Feb 2, 2023

An entertaining way to convince kids to pick up the book.

| Jan 31, 2023

It’s genuinely eccentric enough — with its sly talking cat, intrepid band of gold-hearted rats and chronic aversion to keeping the fourth wall intact — to come off as charming rather than smarmy.

| Jan 31, 2023

It’s a film that’s extraordinarily clever and proud of itself, even though it rarely manages to make that cleverness fun for the rest of us.

| Jan 24, 2023

The overwritten script is laden with insider jokes for older viewers, but the film seems to fall between two stools – the animation isn’t ­especially distinguished and the screenplay is both derivative and overstated.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jan 17, 2023

Funny, wacky, fast-paced and somewhat hollow. It’s a tad shrill and exhausting, especially when non-stop talker Malicia arrives inside the frame, bouncing around like a caffeine-fuelled teen know-it-all.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 12, 2023

A fun, if slightly macabre option for family audiences.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 18, 2022

Just what every kids’ movie needs: creaky gags about poststructural textual analysis! This might not have mattered... if the characters around Malicia were lively, witty or even, yes, animated. Instead these educated rodents are oddly interchangeable.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 16, 2022

... A breezy little film, about how it’s cool to be a rat.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 16, 2022

This is a film with a lot of charm, and gives cinema its most lovable rats since Ratatouille. But I did wonder at points who the audience is.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 14, 2022