One of my all time favourite movies, the storyline is great, the action was amazing, and the romance wasn't the main point of the story line the budding romance formed naturally and wasn't focused on until the feelings were realised. This was very refreshing, I loved every thing about this movie. I would highly recommend that anyone should watch it. A fairytale with mystery, romance, a curse, and magic.

While the plot is a bit confusing, the entire film is beautiful in its aesthetics and has a strong message for girls to take control of their own life and fight for themselves. Dakota Blue Richards is absolutely brilliant in her 2nd major film role and Tim Curry and Ioan Gruffudd add to the magic. Harry Potter fans may see some familiar imagery, for the novel it was based on "The Little White Horse" was a favorite of J.K. Rowling when she was a child. This film deserves much more attention and has much more depth than any of the flashy CGI effects shows at the theaters today.Read my full review: http://kingdomofcult.blogspot.com/2015/05/cult- movie-of-may-17th-secret-of.html

Whatever you do, if you liked the book, don't see this movie. The whole idea of the book is rather ruined in order to make it appeal to people who didn't read the wonderful book. Starting with the fact that it isn't actually a fantasy book. So many things are added simply to make it seem more "magical" when that isn't what the book was about, and many things are just entirely wrong or tossed out so there isn't confusion when an idea was really quite simple. Everything is overdone to the extreme. The simple elegance in the description in the book is lost. I would only recommend seeing this movie if all you want is a run-of-the mill fantasy princess movie. I wouldn't say it has spark or shine at all. Don't expect anything new or a decent depiction of the wonderful story and world created by Elizabeth Goudge.

Fairy tales are movies that either sink or swim when it comes to the silver screen, based upon the merits of their story and the characters that exist to propel the fantasy past the absurd and into the tangibly real. The Secret of Moonacre is unfortunately an example of absurdist fairytale done with little restraint or tact; the story is robust with cliché devices, the characters flat and cursed with banal dialogue, and the backstory, costume designs, production—everything just falls far short of what you may come to expect fro productions of this nature. To be fair, there are certain elements inherent to Csupo's outing here that borders on mildly entertaining if only for the references that they make to other works, yet such moments are far and few between and never truly dispel the sour taste of hackneyed amateurism that permeates the majority of Moonacre's ridiculously generic universe.At its core, The Secret of Moonacre strives to be part adventure fairytale and part whimsy comedy stitched together with undercooked themes of pride, corruption and the power of love to overcome all shadows of the human heart. Ostensibly, this mix has all the elements to make for an enjoyable family feature, yet burdened with a plodding pace and characters that never come off the screen in any manner, the Secret of Moonacre is a dull one. Centring around young teenage girl Maria (Dakota Blue Richards) as she moves into her extravagant and eccentric uncle's mansion in the Middle of Nowhere Forest under the protection of nanny Miss Heliotrope (Juliet Stevenson who serves as a trite source of comic relief every now and then with her biggest character trait being an impromptu belch), Goudge's story is one built upon established ground-works for any old fantasy tale. Sure, fair enough—there's nothing wrong with building upon already tried and tested methods—yet very little is done beyond this to help Moonacre feel like a tale of its own.Perhaps the greatest and most obvious detractive trait inherent to Alborough's adaptation however is simply through its writing which seems to go through the motions at each and every turn. The result is a feature that plods along through countless cliché and predictable contrivances to the point where all fantastical elements are lost within the generic gloop that is the whole backstory and focus point of Moonacre's world. About half way into the movie, it should be no surprise then that the production boils down to one of absurd ridicule—without the feeling of otherworldly mysticism to back up all the theatrical dialogue, sets and costumes, Csupo neglects his feature to being bland and utterly forgettable in spite of its striking visuals and over-the-top performances. In fact, with the exception of perhaps Ioan Gruffudd , the majority of the acting ensemble here feel just as disconnected to the story's fantasy as everything else does. It's not just bad—it's distracting and downright laughable when any sort of tension or conflict is pushed down the throat with little to no tangible reason to believe in it.Yet this neglect to raising the suspension of disbelief is what ultimately stops The Secret of Moonacre from ever truly coming off the screen. Perhaps with a greater budget, some bigger stars and a re-write or two, Csupo could have made something more than a sporadically pretty treat for the senses, yet as it stands nothing of the sort of achieved throughout its bumbling and overly melodramatic runtime. This in turn makes recommending Moonacre a lost cause; young females may be able to enjoy all the unicorns, pretty dresses and coy humour to the extent that everything else is ignored, yet even this assertion serves as a broad test of the imagination—which is ironically more than Csupo manages here through his excruciatingly mundane two hour exercise in creating yet another Pedestrian Fantasy By Numbers.A review by Jamie Robert Ward (http://www.invocus.net)