It felt so derivative of so many better films

| Feb 12, 2021

Errs on the side of sentimentality, favouring uplift over real edge, but while the smoothed-down version has changed some of the details of Sewell's story but the underlying messages of loyalty and kindness to animals remain the same.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 29, 2021

This updated version of Black Beauty is well-done and touches upon some important points about being connected to animals, nature, and learning to care for others.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Dec 18, 2020

To those whose bedroom walls were never adorned with photographs of wild, galloping herds, Black Beauty reads as pretty, but emotionally vacant.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 5, 2020

This new adaptation is consistently gorgeous to look at, but far more manipulative than magnificent.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 3, 2020

If you can edge thoughts of sacrilege from your head, this Black Beauty works well enough as a bank holiday entertainment in the style of mid-20th century Disney television.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 3, 2020

Peril, emotional intensity in adaptation of classic tale.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 3, 2020

Watered-down.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 2, 2020

Aas retained original author Anna Sewell's episodic trawl through owners kind and mean, but reframed things so that it's more a kind of gee-geed up Nicholas Sparks-meets-A Dog's Purpose.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 1, 2020

It's ultimately too inert, even with the changes, to make this familiar story leap off the page. Black Beauty isn't bad, exactly, but rather the kind of flavorless fare that underscores how hard really good family viewing is to corral.

| Nov 30, 2020

Kate Winslet provides the Beauty's voice and gives such depth of feeling I got shivers.

| Nov 30, 2020

The script does everything but have a character walk up to Jo and say "You're just like a horse!"

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 30, 2020

Animal lovers alone should prove susceptible to this film's meagre charms.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 30, 2020

Is this whinny-Winslet flick a winner? Neigh!

| Nov 30, 2020

Black Beauty, too, promises more than it delivers.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 29, 2020

Anna Sewell's children's classic is given a radical Disney overhaul with mostly pleasing results.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 29, 2020

This might just be the wish of a former horse rider, but I'd much rather spend more time with Black Beauty than with Jo or any of the other human characters in her path.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 27, 2020

Disney's Black Beauty adaptation is all in on Horse Girl Canon. However, it is not interested in moving the canon forward as a foundational text.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 27, 2020

A sonorously well-meaning film that bathes everything in the bland, buttery sunlight that Disney always produces and in which the human performances are as opaque as the ones given by the horses.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 27, 2020

The novel's mustang spirit diminishes into a ho-hum horse movie.

| Nov 27, 2020