...offering up horror tropes but grounded in small-town Americana, this is about the most wholesome horror film ever made...

It's not hokey fun like Watcher in the Woods but just chilling and thoughtful and extremely well acted.

In the end, the storytelling saves the film. Like the book, it's a perfect mash-up of two of Bradbury's favorite themes: small-town life and innocence lost in the wake of something sinister.

It's a reminder of when kids movies were about more than farts and wise-cracking animals, and its visuals retain their power to unsettle and unnerve.

Book-based '80s movie about an evil carnival is scary.

Even amidst readily apparent imperfections, "Wicked" still holds a melancholy grip. That's because its supernatural elements are really but a grace note to the symphony of its everyday drama, whose elegant, elegiac qualities have diminished little.

Along with The Watcher in the Woods, it may be Disney's only honest-to-God effort to tell us a horror story.

The property was snapped up by Disney, which promptly sucked the life out of it, turning it into a scrubbed and innocuous coming-of-age tale. Too bad.

Possibilities for a dark, child's view fantasy set in rural America of yore are visible throughout the $20 million production but various elements have not entirely congealed into a unified achievement.

The plot concerns a mysterious carnival outside a small town in the early 1900s that grants the wishes of the town's citizens, with dark consequences.

WICKED needs to be viewed as a different kind of film

Try as I might to get into this movie, based on the classic Ray Bradbury tale, I've found myself blocked by its off-putting ways.

Ultimately, though, it's an uneasy blend of horror and whimsy, with the allegory being hammered a little too hard for comfort. It's also marred by some dreadfully tacky special effects and set designs.

In its descriptions of autumn days, in its heartfelt conversations between a father and a son, in the unabashed romanticism of its evil carnival and even in the perfect rhythm of its title, this is a horror movie with elegance.

A lively, entertaining tale combining boyishness and grown-up horror in equal measure.