In parallel with his 2009 feature film of Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze and co-director Lance Bangs created this loving and lyrical portrait of the then 81-year-old author, who reflects candidly on his life, career and abiding obsession with death in a series of candid interviews conducted in and around his Connecticut home. Also weighing in with their own appreciations of Sendak's work: Wild Things cast members James Gandolfini and Catherine Keener, Meryl Streep and playwright Tony Kushner.

Screening with
Where the Wild Things Are
Spike Jonze | 2009 | USA | 101m
Jonze and co-writer Dave Eggers' freely associative take on Sendak's sacrosanct 1963 children’s tale is as inspired a work of literary adaptation as Jonze’s earlier Adaptation, adding and embellishing much without betraying a thing. “I didn’t set out to make a children’s movie,” Jonze said at the time of the film’s release. “I set out to make a movie about childhood.” The result ranks among the most empathic and psychologically acute of all such movies—a Wizard of Oz for the dysfunctional family era.