The overall Rating of the movie Where the Wild Things Are is Generally favorable, as metacritic.com has it at a 70 Score out of 100. Not bad, in fact it seems that many movie reviewers loved it. Entertainment Weekly (100), The New York Times (100), Boston Globe (75) and Variety (60).

Here are the more favorable reviews:

Shot with a handheld camera that can barely contain the boy’s image inside the frame, these clattering, jangling introductory moments are disruptive, disorienting — it’s hard to see exactly where Max and the dog are as you all tumble down — and purely exhilarating. Yet after jolting the story to excited life, Mr. Jonze quiets the movie down for a series of flawlessly calibrated scenes of Max alone and with his sister and mother (Catherine Keener), an interlude that tells you everything you need to know about the boy and that announces all that will happen next. -The New York Times

In elaborating on the original book so boldly, and repopulating it so richly, Jonze has protected Where the Wild Things Are as an inviolable literary work. In preserving its darkest spirit, he’s created a potent, fully realized variation on its most highly charged themes.-Washington Post

This version of Where the Wilds Things Are isn’t about childhood at all but about childhood’s end and what’s gained and lost by it. That’s why very young kids, dull Disney princesses, overprotective parents, and self-serious grown-ups should probably stay away. -Boston Globe

The Mixed and less favorable reviews in the media.

I have a vision of eight-year-olds leaving the movie in bewilderment. Why are the creatures so unhappy? That question doesn’t return a child to safety or anywhere else. Of one thing I am sure: children will be relieved when Max gets away from this anxious crew. -The New Yorker

When faced as a director with the rudderless screenplay he (Jonze) co-wrote with Eggers, he’s been powerless to energize it in any involving way. Sometimes you are better off with 10 sentences than tens of millions of dollars, and this is one of those times. -Los Angeles Times

Jonze’s ideas, visual and otherwise, spill out in a faux-philosophical ramble that isn’t nearly as deep as he thinks it is; at best, it’s a scrambled tone poem. Even the look of the picture becomes tiresome after a while — it starts to seem depressive and shaggy and tired. -Salon.com