Flicka

Flicka is finding few friends among critics. "There are so few family-friendly movies and even fewer with girls at the center that I feel awful slamming a movie that is both," writes Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer. David Gilmour in the Toronto Globe & Mail, doesn't exactly slam the movie, but he has little praise for it either. Nevertheless, he writes, "This must be said in all fairness ... When a pale and feverish Katy tells her father it's okay for him to put the horse down ... it's hard to keep one's glasses from steaming up. You know it's not going to happen, but you fall for it. And so do the little girls in the audience -- because that's really who the movie is made for." Still, Manohla Dargis in the New York Times dismisses the movie as "entertainingly ridiculous." Eleanor Ringel Gillespie in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution says she kept wonder what happened to the "My" and the "Fiend" in the title of the original book and movie. "And that's not all that's missing," she remarks. "The screenwriters also have jettisoned much of the book's plot and themes, beginning with a sex change for the protagonist. O'Hara's shy young boy is now a rebellious teenage girl. It's like buying the rights to The Hobbit and then making a movie about a brave boy who climbs a beanstalk and slays a giant." And Lou Lumenick in the New York Post concludes his review by observing, "Some animal-rights activists have organized a boycott because two horses were killed during shooting; the Humane Society says they were unavoidable accidents. Unlike this movie."