Critic Reviews

A charming, beautifully photographed modern fairy tale about love and gardening, This Beautiful Fantastic is worth seeing in spite of its dumb deterrent of a title.

Writer-director Simon Aboud doesn’t push the quirk factor; even when the narrative is at its most playful, he keeps it rooted to a lived-in reality. Mining familiar territory with an earnest clarity, he shapes a mild yet winning fantasy about hearts opening and friendships blooming.

Enjoyable performances keep the tale from becoming too heavy-handed.

Findlay and Scott don’t force their charm on us, Wilkinson makes the aphorisms, anecdotes and literary quotations poetic and warm. So much of it takes place in the flowers and brambles of a garden that the movie smells like spring.

Depending on how you take your twee — sparingly or, as is the case in this preciously concocted tale of English misfits, slathered like marmalade over a crumpet — it will either delight or quickly cloy.

Everything about “Fantastic” is designed to charm, and its success in that respect will depend upon the viewer’s susceptibility to cuteness and contrivance ladled on with some proficiency but no subtlety whatsoever.

Far too precious and eager to please to really deserve its self-description as a fairy tale.

There is such a thing as too sweet, and after this film, you'll feel a toothache coming on.

The friendship lessons are sweet enough, but such a low-stakes story strains one’s patience for such affected cinematic style.

This Beautiful Fantastic is not meant to be realistic. It's supposed to be a fairy tale. That's fine, but it's a very low-stakes fairy tale, wrapped in a strained garden metaphor.