A good children's movie. To split hairs: a good movie for children and also a movie good for children. Good for them in the sense that it is a good introduction to concepts of the inner world and the outer world, living and dying, growth and stuntedness, courage and surrender -- besides a good introduction to the artistic presentation and development of these concepts: why shouldn't children's movies be as good artistically as anyone else's? And because it's a good movie -- actually a very good one -- it is also a good refresher for the adult: a return to mythic basics. The somewhat underplotted story, from the Frances Hodgson Burnett novel, tells of how an orphan girl comes to live with her widowed uncle at Misselthwaite, a gloomy monstrosity on the moors, with secret passageways, locked doors, a key-jangling housekeeper, unidentified wails and moans (dogs? the wind?), all the trappings of a Gothic novel -- and of how the girl brings the place back to life: "The house seemed dead, like a spell had been cast upon it." The girl herself (ten-year-old Kate Maberly) starts out sullen and snooty. What draws us to her, nonetheless, and to the pasty-faced bedridden cousin to whom she promptly traces those wails and moans, is the enveloping subjectivity through which the story is filtered. Agnieszka Holland, of Europa Europa and Olivier Olivier, might seem an odd candidate to direct a piece of sentimental Edwardiana, but she is for once free to indulge her eye for detail without having also to indulge her eye for irony, and she has made everything here magnificently physical, palpable, solid -- she, and her cameraman Roger Deakins, and her production designer Stuart Craig, together concocting a rousing apologia for studio filmmaking. At bottom the movie is little more than an Illustrated Classic, but what illustrations! The Caspar David Friedrich bleakness of the estate in winter. The Pre-Raphaelite lushness of the garden. The deliberately too-fast pan that transforms the blossoms into an Impressionist blur. The prelapsarian image of perfect, Franciscan harmony between man and animal. With Maggie Smith, Laura Crossley. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd