It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

This is an astonishing documentary that will wring your heart while it bends your mind

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The fate of movies is a mystery. Why should it be that certain mediocre films draw crowds large enough to wrap twice around the block, only to be just as soon forgotten, while others, marvelous films, never catch on at all, and end up lost through decades, waiting only to be rediscovered one day, when a DVD edition suddenly blesses them with a second life?DreamChild is a monumental work of art that rests on another monumental work. Of course, it helps that as a kid, I was fascinated by Lewis Carrol's famous adventures of Alice in Wonderland and Thru the Looking Glass, as well as the wild and often creepy, psychedelic universe beautifully rendered by artist Sir John Tenniel. It's worth noting that, to this day, we owe Tenniel most of the representations we have of the worlds and characters described by Carrol.DreamChild a beautiful film in so many respects. Deeply moving and inviting us, the viewer, to reflect upon the true forces that guide the murky, and sometimes tortuous process from which art is born. The screenplay by Dennis Potter is airtight, witty, often funny, but also dark and complex. Ian Holm as the Reverend Dodgson delivers one of the two best performances of his life (The Sweet Hereafter being the other). Curiously, both deal with the agonizing pain of holding back.Even little Amelia Shankley, who plays young Alice Lydell, the muse throughout the film, is deeply haunting and complex, juggling the tricky emotions that carry the entire picture through to its resolution.This was a fairly low budget production, shot entirely in the UK, but Roger Hall's masterful art direction can convince even a savvy movie buff that he is watching a pricey period picture set in New York City's Great Depression era. Gavin Millar, the director, is mature enough to let his camera witness a powerful story without artifice.There is not one bad choice in this picture, right down to a gorgeous musical score by Stanley Myers. Finally, Jim Henson and his team of artists recreated the wildest and most beloved characters of Alice in Wonderland as animatronic puppets which, thirty years on, hold up perfectly and allow the film to soar with its unique, organic, and at times theatrical charm.I saw this picture in New York City, in 1986, when it received a limited release, and I recall being instantly enchanted by it. I had to accept a poor videotape copy for years and years, until one of the film's crew members in the UK was kind enough to obtain a better copy for me, which I have cherished. But now, a DVD-R has been released in the film's original 1:85/1 ratio and I was recently able to watch it all again, at last in a perfect presentation. DreamChild is a great big film which only had a small life, but it is worth discovering on DVD. It's a picture that could well stay with you for the rest of your life. It did with me.

This is both a beautiful and disturbing film. Ian Holm (recently playing Bilbo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings trilogy) plays the Reverend Dodgson whom the world better knows as Lewis Carroll. Holm expertly dances on the razor's edge of Dodgson's obsession with the youngest of the three Liddle sisters. This is all experienced in recollections of the elderly Alice as she crosses the Atlantic to attend a 100th Birthday Celebration of Lewis Carroll. As she nears the end of her voyage, her dreams start to bleed into her realities. The Wonderland characters are perfectly grotesque Muppet versions performed by Jim Hemson's Creature Shop (we're not talking Kermit nor Miss Piggy here). This is based on the true people and is lovingly interwoven into a fictional account of the true voyage Alice Liddle Hargraves made to Oxford University in 1932. If you're lucky to have the VHS tape, guard it with your life, mine was destroyed and I can only pray this film will be transfered to DVD. Though we're talking Alice in Wonderland and Muppets, this is not a film for those under 17.

In order to fully appreciate this movie a knowledge of both Alice Liddell and Lewis Carroll is recommended. For a film associared with Dennis Potter--who'd previously written an Alice in the 60s...you might expect smut but there's none here. Its all done very tastefully so it would disappoint anyone looking for titillation. Jane Asher has a minor role as Mrs.Liddell,shown as a chaperone on the famous river outing.She played Alice herself in the early 60s for a couple of studio casts. Though its artistic license to suggest Mrs.Hargreaves took along her maid in reality there were two others,one of which was her granddaughter. I liked the scene where Mrs.Hargeaves read out a commercial---for which they'd pay her 1000s of dollars: ""once when I was a little girl I fell down a rabbit hole then picked up a bottle with a label on which said DRINK ME.But today I look for a bottle which says CHARDONAY"

This film follows an elderly Alice Liddell (Coral Browne), the girl who inspired Lewis Carroll to write his books ‘Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' and ‘Alice Through The Looking Glass', to America, where she attends a university day in celebration of Carroll's work.During this trip Liddell is forced to come to terms with her childhood memories and the creations with which she has become indelibly associated. Thanks to Jim Henson's workshop the Mock Turtle, the Dormouse, and others, achieve frightening realistic shape in their appearances to old Alice. She also sees in flashback the effect Carroll has on her family with his stories (Ian Holm plays Carroll beautifully, Amelia Shankley plays the young Alice well).‘Dreamchild' is an odd film and I'm not sure what its point is. It is perhaps only held together by the excellent performance of Browne and the periodic appearances of the puppets, and its exceptional and dreamy visuals.