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100What a shrewd achievement for writer-director Henry Selick ("The Nightmare Before Christmas"), to have made a movie that everyone will acclaim as beautiful, when perhaps the most beautiful thing about it is the sheer ugliness of it all.
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100Thankfully, Coraline is appropriately dark, and like its inspiration, is only a children's movie by the thinnest of margins.
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100Selick's fantastical adaptation of Neil Gaiman's novel will be too dazzlingly rich for many; it'll be like "caviare to the general," as Hamlet said of a complex play enacted for a public with lazy minds.
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100Terrifying and beautiful, believable and fantastical, this is one of the best children's films in years and Selick's finest -- better even than "The Nightmare Before Christmas."
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100This thrilling stop-motion animated adventure is a high point in Selick's career of creating handcrafted wonderlands of beauty blended with deep, disconcerting creepiness.
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100A classic fairy tale with a contemporary sensibility and a spooky horror under the candy-house fantasy.
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100A remarkable feat of imagination, a magical tale with a genuinely sinister edge.
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100The results are nothing short of magical.
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90This is a marvelous family story, tapping into all sorts of childhood dreams and nightmares involving Mommy, monsters and heroic youngsters. Selick's imaginative sets and puppets are in perfect pitch with Gaiman's fantasy.
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90Coraline lingers in an atmosphere that is creepy, wonderfully strange and full of feeling.
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88It pulls audiences into a meticulously detailed universe, familiar in many respects, wacked and menacing in many others.
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88This is perhaps the most effective 3-D movie I have ever seen, with a sophisticated, involving story that will appeal to many adults. The only reservation I have is with the PG rating, which seems too lenient for a story that may give very young children - particularly if they are sensitive - nightmares.
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88A macabre mystery for children and a cautionary tale for their folks, Coraline is a yarn - twisty, knotty, taut - about a perennially bored girl whose parents are too preoccupied with work to pay her much mind.
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88The story is creepy fun and 100-percent different than whatever other crap is flooding the February market.
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88The combination of 3-D photography and puppet-animation - centered on actual figures designed by hand and manipulated frame by frame - creates a world that's dense, active and fluid: a sensory Jacuzzi.
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85Selick puts his real faith not in the gimmickry that Coraline's audiences will think they've shown up for, but in the stronger virtues that they'd likely view as old-fashioned: character, and story, and handmade figures, handmade milkshakes, handmade blades of grass, each one moving utterly persuasively as he and his animators tweak it, frame by frame.
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83For its sheer visual gusto alone, Coraline is a wonder.
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80At the finale of this visual delight, every hired hand and technician also deserve acclaim.
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80Coraline is essentially faithful to the spirit of its source material. But it's also so visually inventive, and so elaborately tactile, that it stands apart as its own creation.
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Coraline Jones isn't the pluckiest or most ingratiating sprite ever to take center stage in a children's film, and her (mis)adventures aren't especially novel, but Coraline is still a consistent splendor to behold.
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80This eccentric and deliriously inventive fantasy finds stop-motion auteur Henry Selick scaling new heights of ghoulish whimsy, buoyed by a haunting score that works its own macabre magic.
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80Coraline is a beautifully designed, rather scary answered-prayer story.
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78Stays remarkably true to a kid's-eye perspective and dormant fears.
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75OK, sensitive tykes may be scared shitless. But those who tough it out with this twisted, trippy adventure in impure imagination will only be the better for it.
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75This is a gloomy film with weird characters doing nasty things. I've heard of eating chocolate-covered insects, but not when they're alive.
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75Essentially a horror movie for kids, but it is also gentle and funny and whimsical, and even in its darkest moments, Selick never forgets who his target audience is. Still, some young children might have a nightmare or two after seeing it.
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75"The Corpse Bride" with teeth, Bruno Bettelheim retooled for the multiplex, a nightmare of daft and creative consequence. I really liked it.
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75The film has been crafted with a consideration that the best family movies appeal not only to a young target audience but to the parents who accompany their offspring to theaters.
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75Presented the usual way, the film would be enchanting. In 3-D, however, Coraline is completely engrossing. Selick uses the technique brilliantly to enhance the comedy and horror that mingle in his more "family-friendly" version of Gaiman's dark story.
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70An extraordinary achievement that nevertheless falls short of its full potential, Coraline is absolutely worth seeing, for older children and adults alike. But the connection will be entirely through your eyes; if you want it to touch your heart, you'll have to go to the book on which it's based.
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70Moment by moment, the film is a font of pleasures, yet there's something about it that keeps the audience at an aesthetic remove. Like Coraline in the doppelgänger world, we swoon over all the neat stuff without ever making ourselves at home.
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70This is the animated film as art film. Coraline doesn't try to ingratiate; it just looms, like a cemetery gate, daring curious souls to tiptoe in and fend for themselves.
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70It's the first stop-motion feature filmed entirely in stereoscopic 3-D, and the technique makes Selick's artwork even more wondrously creepy. The problem is Gaiman's story, which keeps accumulating otherworldly mythology but doesn't establish a clear line of action in the home stretch.
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67Director Henry Selick is all too effective at conjuring grody ghastliness. He's less effective at giving that ghastliness a human dimension, a resonance, a reason for being beyond cheap thrills.
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63Coraline is a plucky heroine, and director Selig's imagination is indisputable. But the story falters in parts, and its dark tone could be off-putting for children.
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60Selick has a great fantasy filmmaker's artistry, but he lacks that overflowing Geppetto-esque love that brings puppets to life. In Coraline, he's woozy with his own lyricism.
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60For all its visual delights, however, Coraline remains more an engaging spectacle than a connective drama. That is chiefly because of the writing. Director-writer Henry Selick doesn't reach for the kind of universality that would enrich the movie.
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50Coraline is distinguished, if you can call it that, by a creepiness so deep as to seem perverse, and the film finally succumbs to terminal deficits in dramatic energy, narrative coherence and plain old heart.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 77 out of 98
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Mixed: 9 out of 98
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Negative: 12 out of 98
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