Metacritic reviews

Magical, subtle, sensitive and touching, I Kill Giants is everything the bombastic “A Wrinkle in Time” is not.

Walter brings a sense of the epic to Kelly's uniquely sensitive story that bravely faces down the good and the evil that exists within us all.

Walter is riding a tricky line, but it’s his mixing of fantasy and reality, making the edges between the two porous, that ultimately sells the film.

It’s at once familiar and unsettling, with shades of "Pan’s Labyrinth" and "Return to Oz."

Imogen Poots and Zoe Saldana add their names to the project but, although they give solid turns, their roles are secondary. The star is relative newcomer 15-year old Madison Wolfe, whose performance is note-perfect.

Directed with creative style by Anders Walter (with a screenplay by Joe Kelly, adapting his own comic book), I Kill Giants is a good-looking adventure fable that makes great use of the Northeastern coastal locations.

Beyond the characterization of its complex anti-heroine, though, I Kill Giants doesn’t stray too far from an established collection of story beats, stretched thin over a slightly too-long 106-minute run time.

While the film isn’t as subtle as A Monster Calls or Where the Wild Things Are, it captures the messiness of suffering just as well.

That the perspective this time is from a girl’s point of view rather than a boy’s is significant. At least it is in theory. The scripter is Joe Kelly, who, along with J.M. Ken Nimura, created the comic. It’s not a knock to note that the main creative talents behind the camera are male — the women of the cast are clearly imbuing their characterizations with what they know. But there’s still something about I Kill Giants that feels projected, a work more informed by empathy than experience.

It’s well-intended, it’s heartfelt and in its small-scale fashion it’s surprisingly ambitious, but it’s also content to cheat its own premise and withhold its genre pleasures, which effectively undermines Barbara’s journey.