It needs the power of imagination to be done effectively and I just didn't think it was here.

I thought this was delightful, a little depressing at times but with three stellar performances from Fanning, Huffman, and Patricia Clarkson.

There's a lot more perspiration than inspiration.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

It leaves you frustrated and annoyed.

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

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

Elle Fanning, and her audience, deserve better.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.