These are the events that speak of an interesting and exotic adventure of its kind. It is a different kind of escape and adventure, where Max decided to run away from home and sail to an island full of exotic creatures. There Max will be able to get whatever he wants because of that different world filled with creatures that made him king.
[Jonze has] achieved with the cinematic medium what Sendak did with words and pictures: He's grasped something true and terrifying about love at its most unconditional and voracious.
Gordon and the Whale
August 28, 2013
Spike Jonze adapted a book with less than 200 words into a 90-minute feature and it's simply wonderful.
Director Spike Jonze gets that Max's subsequent journey to the far-off island of the wild things is nothing less than an odyssey into his mind.
TheMovieReport.com
January 27, 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.
Intellectually interesting, visually arresting and filled with invention, there's just one crucial thing Where the Wild Things Are is missing: wildness.
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.
