| Netflix | Release Date: October 21, 2022 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
22
Mixed:
9
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Sep 14, 2022
Henry Selick returns to our screens with Wendell & Wild, a new stop-motion nightmare that brings an edgier and darker tone, more mature subjects, and even more laughs to the director's toolbox. Partnering with Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key, this is a feast for the eyes; a hilarious, spooky, empowering story; and a movie you'll want to add to your Halloween rotation.
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Sep 14, 2022
Even if Wendell and Wild, based on an unpublished novel Selick co-wrote, packs a little too much in, you can just sit back and enjoy the magic of Selick and his puppeteers' visuals. It's a good reminder of Selick’s visionary talent, and some of the creatures he has cooked up defy easy description.
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Sep 14, 2022
For all the clever satirical touches and asides, the gorgeously intricate, wondrous stop-motion landscape is ultimately pure Selick, imbued with a fitting color scheme of swirling, eerily glowing greens and purples choreographed against a mischievous score by Bruno Coulais that effectively sets the mood for the film’s pre-Halloween arrival.
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Oct 24, 2022
The result is so bursting with sight and verbal gags, Afropunk aesthetics and socially conscious subversions that it can be too much to take in. Like a bountiful trick-or-treat haul, you should probably come back to this bag of dank goodies multiple times, rather than try consuming it all in one sitting.
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Oct 21, 2022
Selick and Peele operate a bit at cross purposes in Wendell & Wild. The genius visualist wants to haunt our dreams. The socially engaged provocateur wants to haunt our troubled collective realities. Whatever doesn’t quite mesh in their collaboration is easier to forgive when feasting upon such extraordinary sights.
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RogerEbert.comSep 13, 2022
At 105 minutes, it’s a little overladen, as Selick and Peele over-complicate their storytelling with subplots and even commentary on the prison industrial complex. However, there’s no denying that this is a world that animation fans will just want to explore, to live in, to savor. It’s been too long since we got a window into Henry Selick’s brain and it’s still an amazing view.
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Nov 5, 2022
There’s clearly a lot at play: guilt, grief, purgation, conformity, electoral fraud, and the prison industrial complex to cap it all off. What may have been appropriately lolled out on paper feels distending within a 105-minute runtime, where big, salient ideas are brought only to a simmer.
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Oct 25, 2022
Beneath it all is the story of a child’s love and guilt — and an education and judicial system letting her down — which propels her to bring her parents back from the dead, but that gets a little lost in the gross-out humor, Addams Family-level weirdness and shock-for-shock’s sake visual gags like a demonic teddy bear. For all the lovingly crafted spectacle, Selick’s agonizing, shot-by-shot film, is as overstuffed as that bear.
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