Top movies of the week: LAIKA’s hand-made Oregon gothic opens Friday against DC’s body-horror gamble — and the week’s real story is craft beating franchise.
By Becky — The Cinephile — CelebnMusic247
One weekend, two bets. On Friday, October 23, LAIKA releases the most labor-intensive animated film in its history while Warner Bros. and DC Studios open a hard-R body-horror origin story — and the week’s frame writes itself: one film asks what hands can make, the other asks what a franchise can survive. Here are the top movies of the week, ranked.
#1 — Wildwood
Wildwood is LAIKA‘s sixth stop-motion feature and its most ambitious: an adaptation of Colin Meloy’s novel (with illustrations by Carson Ellis), directed by Travis Knight, following Prue McKeel as she crosses into the Impassable Wilderness outside Portland to rescue her baby brother Mac — abducted by crows, in the book’s indelible phrase, at the behest of the exiled Dowager Governess. Per LAIKA’s official materials, the film features the most puppets, the largest sets and the biggest battle sequence in the studio’s history; production materials put the effort at some 200 sets and more than 130 puppets. The voice cast stacks Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Awkwafina, Jake Johnson, Charlie Day and Amandla Stenberg. LAIKA’s own marketing puts the advance praise plainly — “The Most Ambitious Animation Ever Made,” a line LAIKA says it must earn at the box office, with critics’ early screenings calling it “a masterpiece of craftsmanship.” All of that is per LAIKA’s (admittedly interested) official materials — the opening-weekend receipts will file their own opinion on Friday.
Why it tops the week: no other release asks this much of its makers or its audience. A five-years-in-the-making puppet epic with a real point of view about wildness and empire opens in a market that rewards neither — and the honest critical position is that its existence is the news. See it on the biggest screen available; hand-made scale does not survive a phone.
#2 — Clayface
Clayface is the week’s other essential bet — DC Studios’ R-rated body-horror origin, directed by James Watkins from a script originated by Mike Flanagan, starring Tom Rhys Harries as washed-up actor Matt Hagen, whose desperation for a comeback leads him to an experimental face-restoration treatment with mutating consequences. If you have read our earlier coverage this week, the essentials are the same because they are the story: a prestige horror pedigree, a franchise deliberately testing whether its universe can hold a tragedy without quips, and first reactions per industry coverage that describe genuine discomfort rather than comic-book fun. It opens Friday against Wildwood — an almost too-perfect scheduling accident: the hand-made film and the face-melting one, head to head.
The rest of the field
Now in week two: IT: Welcome to Derry‘s companion theatrical push and the October horror holdovers continue to overperform their tracking, per box-office reporting — horror owns this month every year, and 2026 is not breaking the streak. Still rolling: the awards-season platform releases expanding from New York and Los Angeles, doing the slow-build dance they do every October. And the sleeper to watch: any horror title still in the top five after Halloween weekend earns the season’s most reliable label — legs.
How we rank the top movies of the week
This list ranks the week by a simple critic’s stack: ambition, craft, conversation value, and the likelihood you will still be thinking about it on Monday. Box office is reported, not worshipped.
The 247 Take — Take the double feature if you can: Wildwood first, while your belief in hand-made things is fresh, then Clayface, to watch a man’s face come off. Friday is the most interesting day at the movies this month.
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Sources: LAIKA Studios (film details, cast, production scale — official studio materials); Warner Bros. (Clayface official film page)
