In Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze’s masterful translation of Maurice Sendak’s beloved book, the pains, and uncertainties of growing up find a deeply personal home.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 30, 2023

It’s as honest a tale of being a child as you’ll find on screen, with all of the fantasy and reality and joy and anxiety of childhood grounded in the imagery and the landscapes of a tyke’s mind.

| Aug 19, 2023

There's plenty of amazing, surreal imagery and a brooding atmosphere, but little magic brightens this fantasy world.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Nov 29, 2020

Where the Wild Things Are isn't designed to distract children, but rather to celebrate them.

| Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 27, 2020

A moving, thoughtful look back at a time in our lives when we didn't understand the way the world works.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 11, 2019

A mood piece, a wholly transporting and wonderful film that exists in that special realm where the young and the young at heart meet.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 6, 2019

Here's a film that manages to stay true to its roots, while expanding it into new depths that will surely please all the book's fans.

| May 11, 2019

It's a brilliant film in how it gives our character an opportunity to confront himself and his mother and realize they are both imperfect but trying.

| Original Score: A+ | May 4, 2019

This isn't just an adaptation of a beloved children's book-it's a reworking of the story that captures the essence of the thing and blows it out in a way that's both unexpected and familiar.

| Mar 9, 2019

The emotional departure Max finally takes from the Wild Things almost redeems the rest of the film in its wordless anguish. Yet, for all that, it still doesn't have the charm of the brief original.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 1, 2018

The advantage of adapting Maurice Sendak's slim tome is that there is plenty of scope for interpretation; however, for the first time in his career, Jonze comes up short in the imagination department.

| Nov 1, 2018

Jonze isn't always successful in his sometimes-esoteric interpretation of the book. But his attempt shows that he has sensitivity to the smaller dramas of the human experience.

| Oct 8, 2018

It's a quiet reminder of the power of scary-ish stories, and it's made with warmth, humor, and wisdom.

| Sep 25, 2018

It is bewildering but not in an emotionally complex or troublesome way. It's bewildering in a narratively confused, narratively lost, we-never-figured-out-what-we-wanted-all-this-extra-stuff-to-add-up-to sort of way.

| Aug 30, 2018

Fortunately, we have artists like Maurice Sendak, who remain unabashedly young at heart and wondrously capable of connecting with the child inside us all.

| Jun 26, 2018

The minus I give this children's story pains me...If I had seen this film when I was eight, I would have been terrified.

| Jan 17, 2018

Spike Jonze's film adaptation of Sendak's beloved 1963 picture book, Where the Wild Things Are, evokes that state of being, of creative and destructive feelings undiluted and sometimes unchecked.

| Original Score: B+ | Aug 23, 2017

It's gorgeous but slow in parts.

| Oct 5, 2016

Unnecessarily gloomy and emotionally convoluted, Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers' script for Where the Wild Things Are is a melancholy adaptation of the one-two punch that is the heavily illustrated, scantly written book by Maurice Sendak.

| Mar 5, 2014

Does leave a lingering impression--but more due to the nagging feeling that it never quite connects than to Jonze actually meeting his grandiose thematic ambitions.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 27, 2014