Wonder, as effective as it is, is a movie in which everything has a way of working out with tidy benevolence.

Fans swear by the intellectual depth and the liberating story of Perks of Being a Wallflower, Chbosky’s only other big film, but even that failed to register with me as little more than being dunked in a well of emotions without really soaking in anything. Sadly, this film fails to make a splash either.

‘Wonder’ tells a great story with layers of deep feeling and questions of identity and makes the whole thing feel like a breeze.

Don’t miss this Julia Roberts and Jacob Tremblay starrer…In any lesser hands, the film could easily have become either too exploitative or too maudlin. Instead, Chbosky, the co-screenwriter of Wonder, just gets what the book is about.

You don’t need extra frills when you have an actor like Tremblay effortlessly delivering another tremendous performance — who makes you empathise with him without being overtly sweet. After Room and now Wonder, he’s pretty much en route to becoming a superstar.

There are points when you will reach out for some tissues but they’re peppered with enough laughs along the way to make it well-balanced, extremely relevant and combined with a strong message. This wholesome family entertainer is certainly worth your time!

All of these characters, or nearly all of them, are given backstories, heralded by their names in intertitles, sympathetically letting us in to their private lives. (Not Julian though: he gets to be the bully, and that’s it.) But there are no real ironies or complexities and Miranda’s secret emotional journey is outrageously unlikely. It is a film with all the depth of a fridge magnet.

Watch it for the sheer adventure. For those who don’t speak or understand Marathi, there is the universal language of cinema, and subtitles.

It doesn’t come close to Marvel’s Avengers, but thanks to top work by Gal Gadot, Jason Momoa and Ben Affleck, it’s certainly a more lighter film than Batman v Superman.