Stardust: Critic Reviews

It's the closest the movies have come in a while to the nudgy, knowing fairy-tale enchantment of The Princess Bride.

The movie assumes that its churning energy, lightened with whimsy, will carry the day. And, to an extent, it does.

A wackily surreal, primary-coloured fairytale from a graphic novel by Neil Gaiman.

Stardust lights up the screen with a splendid tale of heroism and romance. You don't have to be a fan of fantasies to enjoy its considerable whimsy.

A supernatural fantasy action adventure whose combination of whimsy and gothic melodrama seems to have been cobbled together from focus groups held at Comic-Con and Renaissance fairs.

The movie isn't remotely as sardonic or irreverent as it so clearly wants to be.

This is less an adaptation of Neil Gaiman's 1999 novel than of its dust-jacket synopsis, which will come as disconcerting news to fans of the author's delicate jigsaw-puzzle fantasies.

A kitchen-sink fantasy, in both mood and content. It is exciting, funny, adventurous, magical and very romantic. The special effects are great, but the characters are even better.

Immensely winning and visually arresting.

No, Stardust isn't a children's movie. It's a movie for anyone, of any age, who believes in magic -- or wishes they did.

As with most fairy tales, it can sound silly and overcomplicated because, really, it is silly and overcomplicated. That's part of the fun, part of its out-of-this-world power.

We can tell you this: Your own pure escapism is assured.

It's puffed up in obvious ways but disarmingly puckish in others.

There are lots of good things in the movie, but they play more like vaudeville acts than part of a coherent plot. It's a film you enjoy in pieces, but the jigsaw never gets solved.

Stardust piles on the conflict and the bombast.

I'm a sucker for fantasies, but this one is so undistinguished and arbitrary that it left few traces in my consciousness, apart from the impression that the filmmakers resort to cruelty whenever they run out of ideas, which is often.

It brings too much of everything to the table: It's the cinema equivalent of a long, winding, run-on sentence.

The story respects the captivating power of fairy tales, while humorously twisting them a bit.

Unfortunately, putting witches in a script does not guarantee magic. Stardust simply has no sparkle.

It feels a bit tired, a bit formulaic, a bit like too much studio input and script doctoring.

Everything but the enchanted kitchen sink shows up in the sprawling fairy tale Stardust.

An overstuffed, overlong epic with a tongue-in-cheek approach that repeatedly begs unfavorable comparisons with The Princess Bride.

The stuff dreams are made of.

Stardust [feels] episodic and clunky, constantly straining for the impression of overall coherent design that Gaiman renders invisible.

Like the star that falls to Earth near the beginning of the movie, Stardust is glittery and pretty and possesses its own pleasing-enough personality, but it won't set the world on fire.