There's a lot more perspiration than inspiration.

| Original Score: C+ | Mar 9, 2009

Though Phoebe is nearly too dark for children and nearly too simple for adults, it succeeds as a swirling reminder of what it felt like to get lost in imagination

| Original Score: B- | Mar 9, 2009

The taxing whimsy of Phoebe in Wonderland proves more grating than poignantly escapist.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 6, 2009

[Elle Fanning is] an astonishingly natural and unmannered actress who carries this rather ungainly movie on her narrow shoulders.

| Mar 6, 2009

Barnz has made a poignant family movie that, despite its thematic material and brief profanity, is appropriate for mature 10-year-olds and older.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 6, 2009

Let Clarkson and Fanning take you to the rabbit hole of seductive enchantment that defines this movie.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 6, 2009

It's a rare thing when a labor of love turns out to be worth both the labor and the love.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 6, 2009

Writer-director Daniel Barnz manages to achieve a true and delicate balance for much of Phoebe in Wonderland, his first feature, but ultimately undermines himself with heavy-handed and rather hackneyed whimsy.

Full Review | Mar 6, 2009

The screenplay is unusual in its reliance on children for many of the scenes, and its understanding of the drama in the heart of a troubled 9-year-old.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 6, 2009

It leaves you frustrated and annoyed.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 6, 2009

An uneven, unfocused amalgamation of ideas and moods that is at times deeply moving nonetheless.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 6, 2009

It's that kind of movie, full of therapeutic notions paraded as poetry and scenes that seem to carry explanatory labels.

| Mar 6, 2009

Elle Fanning, and her audience, deserve better.

Full Review | Mar 6, 2009

Make no mistake, there is a euphoria to Phoebe's journey, a delicious wonderment to her ability to see the world through a prism entirely her own.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 6, 2009

Phoebe in Wonderland gradually loses its grip on tone and believability, climaxing with a show-must-go-on moment that's just plain silly. Thankfully, Barnz knows exactly where to end his film: on the face of a girl, and an actress, at the crossroads.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 5, 2009

For all its cop-outs, Phoebe still trumps the 'how to be a better person' hoo-hah of so many middlebrow dramas, if only because the problems it depicts are real, not overcooked reactions to trumped-up traumas.

| Original Score: B | Mar 5, 2009

Unfortunately, the film is insultingly soft in its portrayal of neurological disorders, linking the disease to Phoebe's fanciful conversations with characters from Alice in Wonderland.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/6 | Mar 4, 2009

Phoebe appears to have obsessive-compulsive disorder (or something), but Phoebe in Wonderland is so intent on celebrating her as 'special' that it quirks up the trauma of her issues.

| Original Score: C+ | Mar 4, 2009

The performances are transcendent -- especially Fanning's, as the little girl who wants to get better, who wants to be better, as she slowly disappears through the Looking Glass.

| Mar 3, 2009

It's a young-girl-cracks-up movie in the mode of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden crossed with a theater vs. reality subtext that feels like A Child's First Synecdoche, New York.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 3, 2009