Sometimes there’s too many cooks in the kitchen. Sometimes there are too many storylines in a movie. Same difference.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 11, 2022

This needs a lot more chaos energy to power it past the rough spots. None of this should detract from the movie’s good elements and better-angels best intentions.

| Oct 31, 2022

The story is a touch convoluted, but it’s a gleefully grim good time.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 30, 2022

As offbeat and personal as the director’s best.

| Oct 29, 2022

Wendell & Wild’s biggest narrative problem is its lack of a strong central focus.

| Oct 28, 2022

A pleasant, plotty resurrection with a superb soundtrack.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 28, 2022

A brave young heroine (Lyric Ross as Kat), wildly imaginative visuals that reward a second and third viewing, and some nicely satisfying twists.

| Original Score: B+ | Oct 28, 2022

“Wendell & Wild” may not succeed, but I took heart from this: At least it doesn’t succeed in unconventional ways.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 27, 2022

Fans of “Key & Peele” will love their latest duet. Much of their dialogue sounds improvised, and the pair work off each other like the pros they are.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 27, 2022

Wendell & Wild marks the anarchic return of one of the most exciting directors in animation, retooling his idiosyncrasies in service of a boundary-pushing children’s horror with strong political messaging.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 27, 2022

Stop-motion movies — and films this bizarre — aren’t easy to get made. Wendell & Wild is something special: a little messy, but so weird and wonderful.

| Original Score: B+ | Oct 27, 2022

The story lines feel far-flung and disconnected, and the limits and rules of this world’s magical logic are at turns underdeveloped and inconsistent.

| Oct 27, 2022

It’s the perfect Halloween movie and one of the best animated films of 2022.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 26, 2022

In many ways, this film has the creepiness of The Nightmare Before Christmas fused with the girl-power of Coraline but for less pay-off than either.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 26, 2022

This is a very strange movie in its moments, even if the execution is dull as anything.

| Oct 24, 2022

[Selick has] made another creepy holiday classic with “Wendell & Wild,” and if some of it makes your tummy ache, that’s OK. It was most likely intended to.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 24, 2022

It’s so packed with gloriously demented visuals and bold thematic swings that try, with varying degrees of success, to lift the film out of the realm of pure fantasy, that we’re not entirely bothered by the convoluted story.

| Original Score: B | Oct 24, 2022

“Wendell & Wild” actually has a few things to say (about teenage grief, the privatization of prisons, and raising your parents from the dead), but mostly it’s content to fly off in all elegantly cracked directions.

| Oct 22, 2022

Given its authorial heft, the greatest sin of “Wendell & Wild” isn’t that it’s flawed; it’s that it’s forgettable.

| Oct 22, 2022

It's a busy plot — too busy by about half — but Selick's vision is as fresh and unfettered as ever, and his black and purple color tapestry is a window into a dark and colorful world.

| Original Score: B | Oct 22, 2022