The antidote to the modern animated movie.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 27, 2014

This kind of stop-motion animation (wittily demonstrated during the end credits) results in wonderfully detailed characters and action.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 26, 2014

There are many more delighted 'Ewwws' than too-easy 'Awws' in this charming, if a tad cynical, feature from the creators of Coraline and ParaNorman.

Full Review | Sep 26, 2014

It's a world that runs in a parallel universe akin to that of Charles Dickens, with creatively named characters involved in seemingly outlandish adventures in a Victorian-era city where a moral or two plays out in the end.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 26, 2014

It's a felt, funny, bracingly sincere kids' movie. And even more refreshing, it takes as a theme our social fixation with waste, salvage and repackaging.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 26, 2014

Without being didactic, "The Boxtrolls" presents the dangers of a hierarchical society, separated out into high-status and low, and also has some very interesting and moving things to say about identity, family, and morality.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 26, 2014

It's a wonderful world, full of Rube Goldberg contraptions below and colorful Dickensian squalor and excess above.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 26, 2014

In "The Boxtrolls," old-fashioned stop-motion animation is combined with new-style 3-D cinematography to charming effect.

| Sep 25, 2014

Directors Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi have done astounding work in orchestrating a dizzying amount of visual detail into the warm, earth-toned above and underground worlds of The Boxtrolls.

| Sep 25, 2014

The details are impressive: 190 puppets built, 79 sets constructed, 20,000 handmade props, 200 costumes, 26 locations, 56 cameras, 892 lights, 53,000 face parts.... But somehow it still doesn't add up to enough.

| Sep 25, 2014

Boxtrolls' world is fantastically detailed and physical, with every frame crammed with complicated machinery, hand-painted textures and handcrafted props, and a sense of vast and focused attention.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 25, 2014

Deliciously grotesque at times, but the message is a sweet one: families come in all sizes and shapes, sometimes biological, sometimes not, but what defines them is love.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 25, 2014

Imaginative but very weird, more Monty Python than Walt Disney. Not for all tastes.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 25, 2014

[A] totally offbeat and original tale for kids (and adults) looking for something a little more challenging and completely off the wall.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 25, 2014

Like one of its wondrously designed steampunky contraptions, "The Boxtrolls" is a marvelous thing to behold, and watch spin, even if it doesn't go anywhere terribly interesting.

| Sep 25, 2014

What makes Boxtrolls truly special is how it challenges kids to consider that the true villain may be the person calling others villains.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 25, 2014

The story of "The Boxtrolls," in lesser hands, might have turned out only so-so. Under Laika's loving, labor-intensive touch, it takes on a kind of magic.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 25, 2014

Do not think outside "The Boxtrolls." Instead, give yourself over to the movie's captivating, inventive, scary-hilarious world.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 25, 2014

Why did the story of this huggable species' attempted extinction leave me emotionally indifferent?

| Sep 25, 2014

"The Boxtrolls" remains relentlessly busy up through its final credits, and it's clever in a nattering way. But it's virtually charmless.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 25, 2014