Coraline
Focus Features | Release Date: February 6, 2009 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
80
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 38 Critic Reviews
Positive:
35
Mixed:
3
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
EmpireHelen O'Hara
Terrifying 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." Read full review
100
Entertainment WeeklyLisa Schwarzbaum
This thrilling stop-motion animated adventure is a high point in Selick's career of creating handcrafted wonderlands of beauty blended with deep, disconcerting creepiness. Read full review
100
Charlotte ObserverLawrence Toppman
Selick'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. Read full review
100
Seattle Post-IntelligencerSean Axmaker
A classic fairy tale with a contemporary sensibility and a spooky horror under the candy-house fantasy. Read full review
100
The A.V. ClubTasha Robinson
The results are nothing short of magical. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesKenneth Turan
A remarkable feat of imagination, a magical tale with a genuinely sinister edge. Read full review
100
TV Guide MagazineTracie Cooper
Thankfully, Coraline is appropriately dark, and like its inspiration, is only a children's movie by the thinnest of margins. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
What 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. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterKirk Honeycutt
This 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. Read full review
90
The New York TimesA.O. Scott
Coraline lingers in an atmosphere that is creepy, wonderfully strange and full of feeling. Read full review
88
New York PostLou Lumenick
This 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. Read full review
88
Baltimore SunMichael Sragow
The 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. Read full review
88
PremiereJenni Miller
The story is creepy fun and 100-percent different than whatever other crap is flooding the February market. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael Phillips
It pulls audiences into a meticulously detailed universe, familiar in many respects, wacked and menacing in many others. Read full review
88
Philadelphia InquirerCarrie Rickey
A 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. Read full review
85
NPRBob Mondello
Selick 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. Read full review
83
Portland OregonianShawn Levy
For its sheer visual gusto alone, Coraline is a wonder. Read full review
80
Film ThreatMatthew Sorrento
At the finale of this visual delight, every hired hand and technician also deserve acclaim. Read full review
80
The New YorkerDavid Denby
Coraline is a beautifully designed, rather scary answered-prayer story. Read full review
80
VarietyJustin Chang
This 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. Read full review
80
Village VoiceScott Foundas
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. Read full review
80
SalonStephanie Zacharek
Coraline 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. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleMarjorie Baumgarten
Stays remarkably true to a kid's-eye perspective and dormant fears. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
The 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. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
This is a gloomy film with weird characters doing nasty things. I've heard of eating chocolate-covered insects, but not when they're alive. Read full review
75
Rolling StonePeter Travers
OK, 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. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeTy Burr
"The Corpse Bride" with teeth, Bruno Bettelheim retooled for the multiplex, a nightmare of daft and creative consequence. I really liked it. Read full review
75
Miami HeraldRene Rodriguez
Essentially 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. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Jennie Punter
Presented 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. Read full review
70
New York Daily NewsElizabeth Weitzman
An 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. Read full review
70
TimeRichard Corliss
This 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. Read full review
70
SlateDana Stevens
Moment 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. Read full review
70
Chicago ReaderJ.R. Jones
It'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. Read full review
67
Christian Science MonitorPeter Rainer
Director 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. Read full review
63
USA TodayClaudia Puig
Coraline 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. Read full review
60
New York Magazine (Vulture)David Edelstein
Selick 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. Read full review
60
Washington PostDesson Thomson
For 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. Read full review
50
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
Coraline 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. Read full review
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