Wild Things Great ... for Adults

Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are takes a 10-sentence children’s book and turns it into a full-length movie that’s not really for kids at all. But most critics liked it anyway. Here’s what they’re saying:

• “Parents and tykes expecting the next Shrek will be sorely disappointed if not a little freaked out,” writes Ty Burr of the Boston Globe. “The movie is a wild thing,” and at times “feels genuinely dangerous, wired to explode.”

• Peter Travers of Rolling Stone sees it as “a raw, exuberant mind-meld” between Jonze and Maurice Sendak. “The movie barrels out at you like a nine-year-old boy filled to bursting with joys, fears and furies he can't articulate.”
• Stephanie Zacharek of Salon was less impressed by the “wriggly nonstory” and its too-melancholy “EMOnsters.” Jonze’s creation seems "to be a movie made by, and for, members of a generation who feel it's unfair to have to grow up." But if your kids are the type who have "begged for a civics lesson on the dangers of totalitarianism, then by all means run, don't walk, to Fandango and get your tickets."

(More Where the Wild Things Are stories.)