The Secret Garden

Like all great stories for children, The Secret Garden contains powerful truths just beneath the surface. There is always a level at which the story is telling children about more than just events; it is telling them about the nature of life. Read full review

The Secret Garden unfolds like a richly illustrated storybook. It's an enchanting film, full of visual surprises and a story so simple and wise that it makes most ''children's'' entertainment seem gaudy and facile and overly explicit. [13 Aug 1993, p.C1]

It is, first and foremost, a visual delight, a Victorian picture book come to life, from its brief prologue in India through its darkly enchanted recreation of Misselthwaite Manor on the Yorkshire moors. Read full review

Executed to near perfection in all artistic departments, this superior adaptation of the perennial favorite novel will find its core public among girls , but should prove satisfying enough to a range of audiences to make it a solid performer for Warner Bros.' family entertainment banner. Read full review

The Secret Garden is as much a movie for adults with keen memories of childhood as it is a children's movie. Read full review

While Holland may not have imbued the garden with the enchantment so evident in the book, she has sublimely captured the beauty of the garden itself. It offers a simple but overwhelming connection to the kind of paradise we must look harder to find. Read full review

Sparkling, believable performances by young actors, the steadying presence of veteran Maggie Smith, an elegant musical score by Zbigniew Preisner (including a song co-written with Linda Rondstadt) and, especially, an uncommon respect for the stately pace of the source combine to make a lovely movie. Read full review

Simple in outline, liberating and exquisite, The Secret Garden is loaded with meaning. [13 Aug 1993, p.43]

Ms. Holland's film of The Secret Garden is elegantly expressive, a discreet and lovely rendering of the children's classic by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Read full review

Frances Hodgson Burnett's much-loved children's novel could all too easily come across on screen as the last word in period fustian, but the unforced approach of Holland and scriptwriter Caroline Thompson pierces to the emotional core of a still potent tale. Read full review

Neither talking down to children nor pandering to their parents, The Secret Garden functions something like a fairy tale in the way in which we all can latch onto different aspects of meaning during different stages of our lives and also in the way in which primordial and psychosexual concerns are made palpable in narratively distanced and socially acceptable terms. Read full review

As a children's movie with a fine sense of magic (without fantasy) and a great deal of feeling (without sentimentality), this beats the usual Disney junk hands down, and adults will find it an expert piece of storytelling. Read full review

The Secret Garden unearths a few inventions of its own, it bears its own, quiet charms. Read full review

The Secret Garden combines drama, fantasy, and a little bit of light Gothic horror (the old house with its strange noises). The film is visually stunning, from the eerie insides of Misselthwaite Manor to the time-lapse photography of blooming flowers. Zbigniew Preisner's score adds to the atmosphere without ever becoming obvious or intrusive. Read full review

Holland, working with a largely English cast, brings a different - European, perhaps - sensibility to the film, and I think it works. [13 Aug 1993, p.3F]

Problems aside, The Secret Garden has many qualities that demand respect, especially the performance by Maberly, who captures the spirit of a girl hardened by bad fortune and worse parents. [13 Aug 1993, p.6]

The 1949 film version was definitively a tear-jerker. But Holland, too, has opted for a faithful adaptation, which starts out tart and winds up treacly. [14 Aug 1993]

The garden, an Edenic metaphor that gives the story its fertile power, should be as much of a living character as Maggie Smith's wonderfully brusque housekeeper - but isn't. As a result, everything that follows feels anti-climatic. Even if the plot plods a bit, there are pleasures to be plucked, especially in the performances of the children. [13 Aug 1993, p.4D]

The movie's dark themes, unhurried pace and talkiness make it something of a gamble for many children. But older children - especially those who have been asking specific questions about death - may find some nourishment in this garden. Read full review

Though it can get laborious, and produces the odd unintended chuckle, The Secret Garden is charming and sometimes chillingly authentic. Read full review

With a great set designed by an Oscar winner as well as a cast that includes Maggie Smith and of course, based on a children's favourite, it's hard to see where this could go wrong. It does entertain, but it manages to hold back on the sentimentality that you're left with nothing at all. Read full review

The movie is earnest, heartfelt, and, for all its lavishness, rather plodding. Read full review

Rather than a fresh breeze, it's the stale air of gilded calculation, the uncomfortable feeling that things are excessively just so, that overhangs much that is genuinely appealing about this film. Read full review

Measured against family-film classics like The Wizard of Oz or The Black Stallion, to mention just two of my favorites, The Secret Garden is a bit slender, neither as ingeniously inventive nor as majestically mysterious as the best of its breed. Read full review

The young actors are quite proficient and un-sappy too -- it's not their fault if they too often seem like chessmen being moved around on the director's board, composed into picturesque tableaux. Read full review

It's a gorgeous pastiche of flowers and Gothic architecture that, like a painting on a museum wall, never quite involves the viewer. You'll be momentarily enchanted, then forget it entirely. [14 Aug 1993, p.G5]