The Secret Garden (2020)

"The Secret Garden is as beautiful to look at as ever, but it simply doesn't get across the screen like it knows where it wants to be and what it wants to say."

"The film fails to deliver on its initial promise of branching its story out into bold new emotional terrain."

"In its top-heavy image-driven way, "The Secret Garden" is trying for some of the atmospheric poetry that was missing from Agnieszka Holland's 1993 version. Yet if anything, that just makes it fall further away from the novel's essence."

"The Secret Garden is a mid-tier adaptation, though one with heart and soul."

"The degree to which any of the plot embellishments add to the time-tested appeal of Hodgson Burnett's story no doubt will engender debate. But to the generation encountering it for the first time, its pleasures should be unencumbered."

"This film is not the best representation of Burnett's works, which toed the line between the magical and the painfully - but in the moments when it succeeds, "The Secret Garden" blossoms into something beautiful."

"This adaptation leans heavily on clichés the story doesn't need."

"The Secret Garden doesn't shy away from the implicit "magic" of Burnett's novel, leaning into the whimsy of the story with a hefty dose of magical realism."