Yes, you have to be very mean spirited to give this movie anything less than 10. I mean the kids were sensational. People can complain about the storyline, or yada yada, yada, but you must be deaf not to hear the magical music interweaving with the children's stunning acting and emotional performance. Forget about everything else, the girl was just electrifying and her expressions had me reaching for the towel. initially, I thought that the movie was so slow, but the music told me something special was in store. Then the PQ, and as the black and white scenes rolled in, it was a bit like Charlie Chaplin, some of the nostalgia captured in very different scenes. Different time periods, but captured so well. It was a real treat and if anyone concerned with the film is reading this then, you sir, have accomplished a masterpiece. Fantastic!

This story has so much potential. I loved "Hugo," by the same writer. The parallel time periods and similarities in the stories of the 2 children could have been wonderful if the movie contained some cleverly written exposition.This film was so dimly lit I could hardly see it, even when it was supposedly a normally lit space. The written notes on paper were not readable and they would have probably given me a clue about the plot. It is ultimately about a newly orphaned child, a worthy subject. However, it is unclear who the boy is staying with in the beginning, unclear whether the adult women is a neighbor, a foster mother, or a friend's mother. It is unclear why the 1927 female lead leaves her home to see an actress. There are notes back and forth I couldn't read. Why is the bookseller significant? Who is he? Is he merely a device to introduce the grandmother? How did the boy get the name of this bookshop? It was hard to see the book he was looking at, so maybe there was a clue there?Why a museum setting? What will happen to the boy? Will he get lost in the fake city? Is the fake city better than his sad life? Are we to get from this that real life is too hard and we should escape in fantasy? The grandmother leaves home and never goes back. She gets incorporated into a museum. Is that the boy's fate?

It's not the best story ever, but it keeps you alert through the end. But the best of this movie, in my opinion, is the sound and music and.... the silence. I think you must watch this with a headphone and listen to the weird and beautiful music and sounds. The kind a mix and stereo effects. I LOVE IT. Great!And the time spirit of the 70's is very good. The whole ambiance, everything. The movie is more an experience than entertainment. But again, because of the music and sound-effects. Play it loud!The movie is in no rush. So, no hurry and relax.

On the heel of his universally acclaimed pièce-de-résistence CAROL (2015), Todd Haynes' seventh picture WONDERSTRUCK has been given the short shrift ever since its debut in Cannes' main competition, what is the verdict? Not near the vicinity of the same luster and sophistication of CAROL, but adapted from Brian Selznick's eponymous children book, it is, for the very least, an earnest project pulls its back into a dual time-frames narrative with gumption challenging audience's accepted optic and aural rules (a close kin to Hayne's debut POISON, a triptych with disparate visual ploys). Opening in 1977, Minnesota, a 12-year-old Ben (Fegley) loses his single-mother Elaine (Williams) to a car accident, is struck by lightning and becomes deaf, double hammer, indeed. Absconding from hospital, he goes to NYC to seek out his biological father whom he has never met with only the address of a bookshop as his clue. This is the main story-line, which is juxtaposed with a black-and-white silent byplay takes place half-a-century ago, in the year 1927, the birth of sound cinema, concerning a deaf girl Rose (Simmonds, a feisty heroine in the making, who is deaf in real life), who sets out to look for her idol, silent movie star Lillian Mayhew (Moore), and later wanders alone in American Museum of Nature History, bewitched and plays hide-and-seek with suspicious guards. This is the place where Ben fetches up too, after following an African-American boy Jamie (Michael), who introduces him his inner sanctum with discoveries can only be attributed to kismet. By the time when Ben finally meets an elderly Rose (Moore again, in prosthetics) in the said bookshop, their connection is hovering around long enough to for viewers to infer the most probable answer and bingo! The missing pieces are told with stop-motion animation and cunning bricolage, when the pair sits inside the Queens Museum where a huge diorama of the whole city is in display (a synecdoche of Ben's father's life's work), all under a muted palette complying with Haynes' reimagining of the epoch. First and foremost, the film pays hallowed homage to the soundless world and its dwellers, conscientiously applying notepads and sign language to explicate the narrative, and accompanied by Carter Burwell's fluent score (a lilting escapade in the silent segment), the outcome eclipses the blasé urtext and Moore straightens up an almost tear-jerking payoff in her wordless portrayal that is anything but showy. But not mincing words, a bratty, self-absorbed Oakes Fegley proves to be a monkey wrench in the works, brings ruination to the friendship with Jamie, which in another case, would be the emotional pull of the story. A children's fare vamped up with a grown-up's world-view and wheezes, WONDERSTRUCK is an anomaly to both targets, callow ones might find it rather unexciting in terms of story development, whereas weathered ones probably will whinge there isn't enough time to submerge into Haynes' rabbit hole, a sorry example of 1 plus 1 ends up less than 2.