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A Wrinkle in Time

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A Wrinkle in Time is visually gorgeous, big-hearted, and occasionally quite moving; unfortunately, it's also wildly ambitious to a fault, and often less than the sum of its classic parts.

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"A Wrinkle In Time," about three children and three magical beings trying to locate a missing physicist and stop evil from overwhelming the universe, is as dislocated from the current moviegoing moment as its human heroes are from their lives back on earth. It's a gentle fantasy, seemingly pitched at younger children, that would rather take people by the hand than punch them on the shoulder, and that's a good thing; in fact, it's the wellspring of the movie's best qualities. There's a lot here that feels insufficiently shaped or fitfully realized, but at the same time, there's a lot to like. It's the Platonic ideal of a mixed bag. The newness of the new parts counterbalances the ineffectiveness of the stuff that seemingly every fantasy blockbuster does, and that this one doesn't do well. "A Wrinkle in Time" has zero interest in seeming cool, and in its final third, it ramps up the sentiment into a zone that most big-budget movies don't dare enter in the era of irony and "grittiness."

The story begins with Meg Murry ( Storm Reid ) and her six-year-old adopted brother Charles Wallace ( Deric McCabe ), and their scientist mother Kate ( Gugu Mbatha-Raw ) in a state of mourning over the disappearance of the family patriarch, Alex Murry ( Chris Pine ). The family was baffled by his sudden vanishing, but it turns out to be connected to his research (with Kate) into tesseracts, a phenomenon that allows for the folding of space and time. With help from three magical beings, the goofball Mrs. Whatsit ( Reese Witherspoon ), the regal Mrs. Which ( Oprah Winfrey ) and the wise Mrs. Who ( Mindy Kaling ), the kids leave their world to find Alex, bringing Meg's crush object, Levi Miller's Calvin O'Keefe, along with them. As they travel to a series of galactic locales to free Alex from the grip of dark forces, young Charles Wallace, a prodigy who at times evokes that little kid from " Looper " with the thundercloud eyes, undergoes a terrifying change.

The film's tone is so radically earnest at certain points—particularly when it's dealing with loss and disappointment—that the movie's logo could be a gigantic ear of corn. In its multicultural casting, its child-centric story, and its emphasis on the validity of feelings, it's so different from every other recent big-budget live-action fantasy (superhero films included) that its very existence amounts to a contrarian statement. Much of the emotional heavy lifting is done by the daughter-father team of Reid and Pine. Pine has stealthily become one of the most versatile leading men in American movies, and one of the few who can channel that old-fashioned, George-Bailey-having-a-breakdown-at-the-bar brand of emotionally vulnerable masculinity without seeming as if he's just doing a bit. Like the rest of the core cast, he's doing old-movie style, just-plant-your-feet-and-say-the-lines acting that seems to be pretending that the Method never happened. Reid in particular is quite good at this; some of the notes she strikes early on reminded me of Elizabeth Taylor in "National Velvet" in their near-theatricality, but in a scene with Pine near the end, the facade drops, and it's devastating. You think about how strong this girl had to pretend to be, how impervious to pain, and how it was all for show: a survival mechanism.

The problem is that the minute the film earns our trust and guides us into the story, what it has to show us isn't all that remarkable: mostly a lot of nondescript glittering/pulsing/stretching/bursting CGI, of the sort that you'd see in a substandard Marvel film (there's even a creature that looks like a flying cabbage leaf). This is made impressive more by the characters' reactions than to anything that's onscreen. It also suffers from trying to do too much in its relatively slight 109-minute running time (the source novel Madeline L'Engle has been considered un-adaptable since its first publication in 1962, so it's possible that even a miniseries might've had issues; the 2003 TV movie was a train wreck). And there are times when director Ava DuVernay (" Selma ") and screenwriters Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell have trouble smoothly shifting between the film's various modes, which run the gamut from doomed love story to coming-of-age romance to knockabout comedy to high-minded philosophical odyssey. I wish that DuVernay had given Pine and Mbatha-Raw more scenes. And I wish she'd asked more of Winfrey, who's effortlessly regal but doesn't do much here besides make pronouncements; Kaling, a charming presence who's stuck in a part with dialogue consisting entirely of quotes by great poets and thinkers; and Witherspoon, who's agreeably dotty but never ascends to that Glinda, Good Witch of the North plane she could easily reach were she so inclined. But this is more a matter of wishing the film had done more of what it was doing already than wishing it had done something else.

"A Wrinkle in Time" arrives in theaters during the same week that U.S. viewers observed the 50th anniversary of the premiere of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," a beloved series that was all about respecting the space, the wishes, and the feelings of others. There are many points in "A Wrinkle in Time" where the characters' journeys suggest a big-budget CGI version of that show's regular excursions into "The Neighborhood of Make-Believe," a world in which kindhearted children and adults have poker-faced conversations about insecurity, loneliness, anger, and other mental states openly, amongst themselves and with sock puppets, then return to the "real" world and watch a musical performance or visit a harmonica factory.

In that spirit, Mrs. Whatsit just shows up in the family's house, less like a real-life neighbor than a scatterbrained wood sprite from a Disney Channel cartoon, and the mom is the only character who seems shocked. Mrs. Which is a 40-foot tall shimmering apparition looming over a backyard during her first appearance, and the onlookers seem more intrigued than terrified by her, as if this kind of thing happens a lot. Meg asks her new maybe-beau Calvin to join her in her time-space journey, and he agrees as readily as if she'd asked him to join her on a walk to the local 7-Eleven. It's the kind of movie where you decide to do something and just go do it, and where no questions are off limits because everyone's so thoughtful. I bet Mister Rogers would have enjoyed it.

If you laughed derisively at that line, you shouldn't see "A Wrinkle in Time." If it made you smile, go.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film credits.

A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

Rated PG for thematic elements and some peril.

109 minutes

Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Which

Reese Witherspoon as Mrs. Whatsit

Mindy Kaling as Mrs. Who

Storm Reid as Margaret "Meg" Murry

Zach Galifianakis as The Happy Medium

Chris Pine as Dr. Alexander "Alex" Murry

Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Dr. Katherine "Kate" Murry

Michael Peña as The Man with Red Eyes

Levi Miller as Calvin O'Keefe

Deric McCabe as Charles Wallace Murry

André Holland as Principal Jenkins

Ava DuVernay

Writer (based upon the novel by)

Madeleine L'Engle
Jennifer Lee
Jeff Stockwell

Cinematographer

Tobias A. Schliessler
Spencer Averick
Ramin Djawadi

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Review: ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ Gives a Child of the Universe Powerful Friends

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By A.O. Scott

March 7, 2018

What I remember most about “A Wrinkle in Time” is my second-grade teacher crying over the final pages during read-aloud time, along with nearly everyone else. I suspect some variant of this experience is common among readers who grew up any time since 1962, when Madeleine L’Engle’s beloved science-fiction coming-of-age novel was first published.

The movie adaptation, directed by Ava DuVernay from a screenplay by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell, has been a long time coming , and it arrives in theaters buoyed by and burdened with expectations. It is the first $100 million movie directed by an African-American woman, and the diversity of its cast is both a welcome innovation and the declaration of a new norm. This is how movies should look from now on, which is to say how they should have looked all along. Fans of the book and admirers of Ms. DuVernay’s work — I include myself in both groups — can breathe a sigh of relief, and some may also find that their breath has been taken away.

Mine was, once or twice, though I would describe the overall experience as satisfaction rather than awe. “A Wrinkle in Time,” faithful to the affirmative, democratic intelligence of the book, is also committed to serving its most loyal and susceptible audience. This is, unapologetically, a children’s movie, by turns gentle, thrilling and didactic, but missing the extra dimension of terror and wonder that would have transcended the genre. Thankfully, though, Ms. DuVernay has dispensed with the winking and cutesiness that are Hollywood’s preferred ways of pandering and condescending to grown-ups. The best way to appreciate what she has done is in the company of a curious and eager 10-year-old (as I was fortunate enough to do). Or, if you’re really lucky, to locate that innocent, skeptical, openhearted version of yourself.

Anatomy of a Scene | ‘A Wrinkle in Time’

The director ava duvernay narrates a sequence from her film featuring storm reid, reese witherspoon, oprah winfrey and mindy kaling..

Hi, I’m Ava DuVernay, the director of “A Wrinkle in Time.” [music] So at this point in “A Wrinkle in Time,” this is Meg’s first world. So she’s just hopped to her first planet. And one of the reasons why I really wanted to do this movie was just the very image of a girl of color traversing through the universe, having these adventures. In this moment Meg Murry — played by my great leading lady Storm Reid — she’s being asked to talk to flowers. Because everyone knows that flowers are the best gossipers in the universe. And one of the things about the design of this is I wanted it to feel like our characters were in a world that was somewhat real, but somewhat animated. So I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t hyper-real. We’re not trying to make everything look real. We like the fact that the flowers have a bit of a cartoon quality. I always wanted to step inside a cartoon. So this is basically Meg stepping inside of it. Here Mrs. Whatsit — played by Reese Witherspoon — turns into creature Whatsit. And this is a big change from the book. In the book, creature Whatsit is a centaur — half woman, half horse. What we wanted to do is update Madeleine L’Engle’s beautiful work in “A Wrinkle in Time” — the author — and create something that hadn’t been seen before. Because we’ve seen centaurs on screen. So we created this beautiful leaf-like creature who pulls from the environment. And creature Whatsit now looks like this. [music] And this quote by Mrs. Who — played by Mindy Kaling — Dang. And observed by Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Which — is another update to Madeleine L’Engle’s work to create a new vision of “A Wrinkle in Time.” Oh. Woo-hoo.

The story comes with a heroine who makes such identification easy. Meg Murry is a smart, hurt and very real-seeming middle school student played with wonderful solemnity by Storm Reid. Meg’s father (Chris Pine), a brilliant and ambitious scientist, has disappeared, leaving behind Meg; her brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe); and their mother (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who is also a brilliant and ambitious scientist.

The parental partnership, an intellectual romance and a romance between intellectuals, is conveyed with graceful efficiency in the first part of the movie, which also sketches Meg’s predicament. As she grieves for her father and wonders where he went, she also contends with the usual early adolescent afflictions and anxieties. Her grades are slumping, her classmates tease her, and neither the principal (André Holland) nor her mother seem to understand what she is going through.

The frustrations and injustices of youth can feel as vast as the cosmos. In Meg’s case, they literally are. Her father didn’t just run off, he “tessered,” slipping into a distant part of the universe to prove a hypothesis about space, time and consciousness that he and his wife had developed together. Now he is lost, and everything is threatened by a malevolent force known as the IT (not to be confused with the malevolent force in the movie “It”), which lives on a planet called Camazotz.

Tesser, by the way is the verb form of “tesseract,” a phenomenon rendered more poetically by the movie’s title. That and a good deal more is explained by Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which, three astrophysical principles who take the earthly forms of Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and a literally bigger-than-life Oprah Winfrey. Mrs. Whatsit is a flame-haired, slightly scatterbrained chatterbox. Mrs. Who is an edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations come to life, offering wisdom gleaned from the likes of Rumi, Shakespeare and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Mrs. Which offers her own brand of affirmation, guidance and tough love, encouraging Meg to find and become her best self and to be a warrior for good against the forces of darkness. In other words: Oprah Winfrey. With glittering makeup and shimmering armor.

The special effects are pretty wild, though not always as overpowering as the gasps and exclamations of the characters might indicate. The flying flowers on the planet Uriel are sublime, the spectacle of Ms. Witherspoon transformed into an airborne cabbage less so. In any case, Meg and Charles Wallace, accompanied by a sweet boy named Calvin (Levi Miller), who has a crush on Meg, tesser off in search of their dad, finding picturesque planets and Zach Galifianakis as a grumpy guru called the Happy Medium. It’s fairly mellow fun until the Mrses take their leave and the youngsters must face the terrors of Camazotz and the IT on their own.

At this point, the images become sharper, scarier and more austere, and the emotions more intense. The warmth that is Ms. DuVernay’s calling card encounters a Kubrickian chill as the power of the IT starts to mess around with Meg’s mind and Charles Wallace’s personality. The worst part of the adventure is the best part of the movie, and it’s over a little too soon.

Like Mrs. Which and her colleagues, “A Wrinkle in Time” is demonstratively generous, encouraging and large-spirited. Though it is full of bright colors and passages of visual dazzle, it trusts words more than images, spelling out messages about love, courage and self-acceptance with the conscientious care of a teacher reading aloud to a class. (It also makes canny use of music, both Ramin Djawadi’s score and songs from of-the-moment pop and hip-hop artists.) Nobody will miss the lessons of the movie, and they are fine and timely lessons. Those who take them most to heart will find their way back to Madeleine L’Engle.

A Wrinkle in Time Rated PG. Evil in the universe. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes

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A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

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'A Wrinkle In Time' Review: Ava DuVernay Delivers A Unique And Admirable Mess

Disney's A Wrinkle in Time represents a long-overdue milestone being passed. The fact that the film's director, Ava DuVernay of Selma and 13th , is the first woman of color to helm a Hollywood film with a budget over $100 million is remarkable; that it took the industry until 2018 to allow this barrier to be broken is unforgivable. But A Wrinkle in Time , leaving aside a marketing campaign that portends a new mega-bucks franchise, is a surprising, distinctive, sometimes mawkish, sometimes emotionally wrenching, and all-over-the-place journey. While the film is not always satisfying, its ambitions are winning enough.

Based on the Madeleine L'Engle novel, Wrinkle introduces us to awkward 12-year old Meg Murry ( Storm Reid ). Meg is an outcast at her school, belittled by a mean-girl bully and harangued by her principal for squandering her potential. Meg's troubles start at home, where she, her adopted brother Charles Wallace ( Deric McCabe ), and her scientist mother Kate ( Gugu Mbatha-Raw ) try to get by without her mysteriously missing father ( Chris Pine , the best of the Hollywood Chrises), a fellow scientist. One dark and stormy night, the Murrys are visited by an odd friend of Charles Wallace's, Mrs. Whatsit ( Reese Witherspoon ). The daffy-seeming woman soon invites him, Meg, and her schoolmate Calvin ( Levi Miller ) on a journey through time and space to find Meg's father, accompanied by two other beatifically odd women, Mrs. Who ( Mindy Kaling ) and Mrs. Which ( Oprah Winfrey ). The journey pushes Meg to the emotional brink, as she's forced to face the darkness within herself and the darkness stretching across the universe.

A Wrinkle in Time is both very grand and very internal in scope, with a climax that's literally cerebral. Though some of the L'Engle book translates easily to the big screen, much of the content has been reasonably branded unfilmable. DuVernay and screenwriters Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell have leaned into the challenge as opposed to shying away. Some elements of the book have either been redesigned or jettisoned entirely, largely for good reason. For example, Mrs. Which, in the book, doesn't manifest physically, but when Oprah Winfrey is cast in a big-budget movie, you are going to see Oprah Winfrey in the flesh. However, some of what makes A Wrinkle in Time so distinctive on the page doesn't make a logical or successful jump to the big screen; Mrs. Who, both in the book and the film, speaks largely by quoting different pieces of culture and literature. It doesn't really work on the page, and it absolutely falters on the big screen. (Kaling, ebullient and charming as usual, does her best, but cannot make even her final, groan-inducing reference work.)

But what does work in A Wrinkle in Time often works quite marvelously. Reid has appeared in a handful of other movies and TV shows, but she has been given a star-making role with Meg. The emotional core of the story rests with Meg, and Reid shoulders the burden quite capably. Meg is plagued by, among other things, self-doubt, which isn't always easy to play or compelling to watch; Reid doesn't falter in portraying Meg's crippling lack of self-worth, however. And her big emotional moment is surprisingly raw, a counterpoint to the fantastical elements that make up the foundation of the film.

The three big names here do their best with sometimes impossibly stilted material — Witherspoon, as the chatty Mrs. Whatsit, is the standout. However, they, along with Pine, Mbatha-Raw, and Zach Galifianakis (as the Happy Medium) all exist as support for the three main kid characters. Reid delivers the best performance, although both Miller and McCabe try their best with characters who have only been slightly fleshed out from how L'Engle wrote them. Still, once the three kids are set on a specific mission and the three Mrs. are off-screen for an extended period of time, the film is at its strongest.

What is perhaps most striking about A Wrinkle in Time are its technical elements. Not all of the effects work as intended— the famous scene where Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace are confronted with a suburban neighborhood where each house and its denizens all act in the same robotically conformist fashion has painfully noticeable green-screen, for example. But DuVernay, along with cinematographer Tobias Schliessler and editor Spencer Averick, aim for something unique in the framing and cutting of many sequences and shots. There's an off-kilter, claustrophobic and hemmed-in quality to Wrinkle ; where other big-budget films might open up, the shots and pacing here feel deliberately disjointed and off-center. Once Meg and the others travel to other planets to rescue her dad, it's almost cruel for the filmmakers to not give a bigger sense of scope via wide shots. But even if the gambit doesn't always work, its very existence here is impressive.

There are some scenes in A Wrinkle in Time that run the gamut of emotion, leaping from feeling transcendent to awkward to painful to fascinating in the span of a minute or two. The film is undeniably flawed and messy, but there is a strong, passionate sense of heartbreak at its core, and the underlying message of hope and love manages to be both corny and aspirational. For all of its heady ideas, A Wrinkle in Time succeeds emotionally. For all its flaws, it has a sterling lead performance, some unexpectedly resonant images, and an unerring sense of the woman behind the camera bringing this all to life. A Wrinkle in Time may be messy, but in a uniquely admirable way.

/Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10

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A Wrinkle in Time reviews tesser between 'thrilling' and 'heartbreaking disappointment'

Reactions were mixed from the first few press screenings

A Wrinkle in Time has big names like Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon, direction by acclaimed filmmaker Ava DuVernay, and an empowering message for young girls — especially young girls of color. But not all critics were floored by Disney’s live-action adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s novel.

EW’s Darren Franich called the film “a sincere attempt at empowerment crushed into preachy dullness,” and there were many others from the first round of press screenings with similar sentiments. Variety called it “wildly uneven,” The Hollywood Reporter noted the film “doesn’t charm or disarm,” and Forbes deemed it a “heartbreaking disappointment.”

Others, meanwhile, were overcome by this “uniquely daring” and “disarmingly earnest” film and its “extravaganza of larger-than-life characters.”

Following Selma , the Netflix documentary 13th , and OWN’s Queen Sugar , DuVernay brings to life the story of Meg Murry (Storm Reid), a young girl who journeys (“tessers”) to other worlds in search of her missing father (Chris Pine). Accompanied by her friend Calvin (Levi Miller) and three galactic beings — Mrs. Whatsit (Witherspoon), Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), and Mrs. Which (Winfrey) — Meg is encouraged to find the strength within herself and become a warrior.

Penned by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell, A Wrinkle in Time also features Michael Pena, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Zach Galifianakis, André Holland, David Oyelowo, and Bellamy Young.

“Keep your expectations in check, and you might be pleasantly surprised,” Variety ‘s Peter Debruge writes.

Read some of the mixed reviews below.

Darren Franich ( Entertainment Weekly ) “DuVernay captures L’Engle’s cosmic female vision, splendidly diversifies the cast of characters … and then sends all those characters to planets that all look like green-screen calamities, as colorful and infuriating as Apple’s rainbow wheel of death. You feel some hesitation in the storytelling here. The three Mrs. W’s overexplain every wonder with PowerPoint precision. Anything they don’t explain gets covered by Pine, trapped in a series of horrid flashbacks, including one where he delivers an actual PowerPoint lecture about the film’s psycho-spiritual cosmology.”

Peter Debruge ( Variety ) “Despite such bold choices as casting Oprah Winfrey as an all-wise celestial being and rejecting the antiquated assumption that the lead characters ought to be white, A Wrinkle in Time is wildly uneven, weirdly suspenseless, and tonally all over the place, relying on wall-to-wall music to supply the missing emotional connection and trowel over huge plot holes.”

Todd McCarthy ( The Hollywood Reporter ) “Only the faintest glimmers of genuine, earned emotion pierce through the layers of intense calculation that encumber Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time . Disney’s lavish adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s fantastical 1962 book (there were four sequels) about a girl’s journey through multiple dimensions to find her long-missing father may provide enough distractions to keep kids in the lowest double-digits age range interested. All the same, DuVernay’s first big-budget studio studio extravaganza after breaking through with Selma and the great documentary 13th feels cobbled together with many diverse parts rather that coalesced into an engaging whole. Even if this is widely consumed by the target audience, it doesn’t charm or disarm.”

Alonso Duralde ( The Wrap ) “DuVernay and screenwriters Jennifer Lee ( Frozen ) and John Stockwell ( Bridge to Terabithia ) give it their all, imbuing as much epic grandeur as they can into a story that seems to take place over the course of a languid afternoon. Audiences willing to forgive the script flaws in The Wizard of Oz — why doesn’t Glinda tell Dorothy right away that the slippers can take her home? — will be rewarded with an extravaganza of larger-than-life characters and mind-bending locations if they extend the same slack to A Wrinkle in Time .”

A.O. Scott ( The New York Times ) “Fans of the book and admirers of Ms. DuVernay’s work — I include myself in both groups — can breathe a sigh of relief, and some may also find that their breath has been taken away. Mine was, once or twice, though I would describe the overall experience as satisfaction rather than awe. A Wrinkle in Time , faithful to the affirmative, democratic intelligence of the book, is also committed to serving its most loyal and susceptible audience. This is, unapologetically, a children’s movie, by turns gentle, thrilling and didactic, but missing the extra dimension of terror and wonder that would have transcended the genre. Thankfully, though, Ms. DuVernay has dispensed with the winking and cutesiness that are Hollywood’s preferred ways of pandering and condescending to grown-ups.”

Justin Chang ( The Los Angeles Times ) “Whisked alongside the characters through one space-time wormhole after another, I found myself wishing that this Wrinkle were more focused, more disciplined — that its ceaseless flow of fantastical images cohered into a revelatory new application of L’Engle’s themes and insights, rather than an earnest, sometimes awkward reiteration of them. But if not all the film’s visual gambits and expository shortcuts pay off, they nonetheless turn out to be in service of a uniquely daring and adventurous sort of cinematic translation.”

Matt Singer ( ScreenCrush ) “One scene bleeds into the next with little flow or tension; the kids are told they can’t jump (or ‘tesser’) to a specific location and then they immediately do it anyway; characters go missing and then return without explanation. And the whole time Calvin, Charles Wallace, and Mrs. Which constantly pepper Meg with compliments, reminding her that she is talented and brilliant and beautiful. (Calvin fawns over Meg’s hair several times. Calvin, my dude, you’re making it weird.) They’re not wrong, and as a young woman of color, Reid’s Meg is a refreshingly unusual protagonist for a studio blockbuster. Still, the affirmations are so heavy and so persistent (‘Love is the frequency!’) that it sometimes feels like A Wrinkle in Time is adapted from a New Age self-help book instead of a classic science-fiction novel.”

Angie Han ( Mashable ) “ A Wrinkle in Time is for all the girls – and boys, and non-binary kids, and teens and adults and the elderly – who’ve ever been a Meg. It’s a flawed film that entreats us to love flawed things, up to and including our very own selves. Maybe that sounds like a hoary cliché now. It didn’t feel like one when I was watching the movie, which is so disarming[ly] earnest that I fell completely under its spell.”

April Wolfe ( LA Weekly ) “I’ll get this out of the way: I haven’t read Madeleine L’Engle’s beloved science fiction adventure novel A Wrinkle in Time , but I have seen Ava DuVernay’s heart-on-its-sleeve adaptation. No doubt there will be those who compare and contrast the book and the film, as L’Engle’s words have touched the childhoods of so many, but I’m going in fresh. And while I cannot fold time and return to my youth to experience what it would be like to find comfort in the fictions of a woman who deeply understood children’s fears and insecurities, I can say that as an adult, I was transported by DuVernay’s adaptation to the mindset of my girlhood — embarrassing insecurities and all. This is not a cynic’s film. It is, instead, unabashedly emotional.”

Kevin Fallon ( The Daily Beast ) “It’s the rare live-action family film to feel like a bonafide kids’ movie, with all the trappings of a screenplay catered to that demographic — albeit one that can at times feel on-the-nose, or more didactic than wondrous. It’s a film with lots of Disney-sparkled bells and whistles. It’s also a film that is so pure, to the extent it’s almost jarring to take in given all that’s going on in the world and how jaded we’ve allowed entertainment to become. But all of that is secondary to the film’s — and we’re wary of turning anyone off by even saying the word — importance.”

Scott Mendelson ( Forbes ) “While it is an unquestionable moral good, it is also, as a movie, a heartbreaking disappointment. A Wrinkle in Time is the very definition of a noble failure. It looks great and features a cast to die for, but it lurches from one awkwardly-staged episodic moment to the next, with little in the way of tension, urgency or defined stakes. Its splashy cast all seem to be acting in slightly different movies, with few of them (among the children and adults) hitting the right tone for the admittedly challenging source material. Even with strong imagery and its value beyond profits or IP extension, it barely holds together as a stand-alone 109-minute feature.”

A Wrinkle in Time will open in theaters on Friday.

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A Wrinkle in Time is a sincere, inspiring blockbuster for tweens. Why doesn’t it trust them?

In aiming for Disney-friendly broadness, the film leans away from its source material’s weirdest — and best — parts.

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Reese Witherspoon and Storm Reid in A Wrinkle in Time

There are at least two ways to view Ava DuVernay’s new adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time .

The first is as an inspiring, imaginative movie about growing into generosity and confidence, aimed at tweens. By that measure, A Wrinkle in Time succeeds, and even surpasses its peers — it’s just strange and sometimes visually striking enough to be unpredictable. Some of the images don’t quite hit the wondrous heights they’re aiming for (a creature that resembles a cartoonish flying lettuce leaf among them), but often enough, it feels fresh.

As a girl, I’d have identified with awkward, lonely Meg Murry, uncertain of herself, aware of her faults, and afraid to let others get too close to her. Storm Reid’ s quiet, natural performance as Meg is genuinely affecting, a convincing journey from fear to courage.

I think if I’d seen the movie as a girl, I’d have wanted to follow in Meg’s footsteps — to be braver and kinder, and to understand how love pushes away fear. I’d also have experienced the kind of wonder I remember from watching movies like The Neverending Story , movies that upended the way I thought stories worked.

But, as with Neverending Story, another way to view A Wrinkle in Time is as an adaptation. And for as much as DuVernay’s film is a lovely and good-hearted movie that delivers lots of eye-popping, imaginative awe, its status as an adaptation necessarily raises the question: Was A Wrinkle in Time the right source material through which to tell this story?

What’s in A Wrinkle in Time mostly matches the novel. But a lot was left out.

We have to ask this question because A Wrinkle in Time isn’t just some screenplay someone came up with; it’s based on Madeleine L’Engle’s beloved Newbery Medal-winning young adult fantasy novel, which was first published in 1962. Wrinkle spawned a whole series of sequels and generations of young fans (and some older ones too).

The contours of the film mostly match the novel. Meg Murry, age 13, is the relatable heroine — “ angry and resentful and stubborn, prone to shouting and fistfights and flights of self-pity .” She lives with her beautiful, brilliant scientist mother ( Gugu Mbatha-Raw ), her very average twin siblings (who aren’t in the film version), and her younger brother Charles Wallace Murry ( Deric McCabe ), who is a precocious genius. She is constantly being told to act better and feels like a disappointment to her mother.

Meg’s father ( Chris Pine ) was also a scientist, but he disappeared without a trace years earlier, and nobody knows where he went. Then late one night (a “dark and stormy night,” the book tells us), a strange woman named Mrs. Whatsit ( Reese Witherspoon ) shows up at the Murry family’s door, and amid sandwiches and tea, she mentions, in passing, that “tesseracts” are real. Mrs. Murry nearly faints at the news; her husband was working on research involving these shadowy tesseracts before he disappeared.

Soon, Meg, Charles Wallace, and Meg’s schoolmate Calvin — a boy with a rough home life who’s popular at school but considers himself an outcast — are on a journey to find Mr. Murry, led by Mrs. Whatsit and two companions, Mrs. Who ( Mindy Kaling ) and Mrs. Which ( Oprah Winfrey ). That journey leads them through the universe via “tessering,” which works by folding time and space in ways that make it easy (well, sort of easy) to bounce around to different planets.

On their way, they encounter a dark, heavy shadowy force called IT, which it turns out is evil itself. And the children realize they must fight IT, as other warriors from their planet have done in the past — people, the book’s characters say, like Jesus and Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Bach, Buddha and Beethoven, Rembrandt and Euclid. IT seeks to reduce everyone to sameness so IT can control them; what fights evil, then, is acknowledging one’s own faults and loving others in spite of theirs. That lesson, Meg discovers, is hard to learn.

The story’s broad outline remains largely consistent between the movie and the book, but there are things missing that will disappoint die-hard fans of L’Engle’s novel. Gone are the “Aunt Beast” sequences, which are also where the book often quotes the Bible (more on that in a moment); Meg’s very specific knowledge of mathematics and the periodic table of elements has mostly disappeared, leaving her to explain to Calvin at one point that she saved their lives with “some physics stuff”; the Happy Medium, a woman in the novel, is played by Zach Galifianakis ; and for some reason, Mrs. Who is only able to speak in self-consciously attributed quotations from humans, which begins to feel a tad hokey by the end.

And while a lot of the story’s creepy weirdness is still preserved, the nature of IT — for my money, the most frightening part of the book — is depicted in one scene but then largely ignored, which undercuts the whole enterprise.

The nature of IT has shifted in this movie, defanging one of Wrinkle ’s most salient insights

In the novel, IT isn’t just an evil force that makes people experience “jealousy, judgment, pain, and despair,” as the film puts it. It’s a literal brain, described in the novel as “an oversized brain, just enough larger than normal to be completely revolting and terrifying. A living brain. A brain that pulsed and quivered, that seized and commanded ... IT was the most horrible, the most repellent thing [Meg] had ever seen, far more nauseating than anything she had ever imagined with her conscious mind, or that had ever tormented her in her most terrible nightmares.”

The brain seizes hold of people’s consciousness, and its result isn’t just to make them bad. It actually makes them all the same . It erases the differences between them and makes them operate by preset manuals. Evil manifests as a kind of ideological groupthink.

L’Engle talked about this in her Newbery acceptance speech in 1962 (published in some editions of Wrinkle ), saying:

There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying, dissipating universe that we can help our children avoid by providing them with “explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.”

For L’Engle, the power of evil is not just to make us bad and angry and violent, but also to put us to sleep to what is going on in the world by controlling us — the way we live, the way we think, the way we desire — until we are all the same. And that concept does show up visually in a scene in the film (which appears in the trailer).

But for the most part, the film understands IT as fear that turns to violence and destruction, without a focus on the all-consuming sameness coming from a disgusting central brain. That element is there if you sort of peer between the lines, but it’s not foregrounded in anything approaching the way the book sees it.

Mindy Kaling, Oprah Winfrey, and Reese Witherspoon in A Wrinkle in Time

This is weird because in many respects, it feels like Wrinkle is constructed specifically to counteract a kind of homogeneity that can dominate movies like this. The casting, for instance, makes Meg biracial, Mrs. Murray and Mrs. Which black, Mrs. Who and Charles Murray Asian (he is adopted) — none of which is in the book, but none of which is substantially excluded by the book, either. Mrs. Who’s quotations are carefully drawn from sources all over the world, and she names the country of the speaker each time. The movie chooses to thwart traditional onscreen Hollywood sameness.

So losing the substance of what IT does feels like, at best, a lost opportunity for the film, and at worst, a misread of the story. Succumbing to IT makes life easier — “everything’s taken care of, in total, without options or alternatives,” Meg is told, and she’s tempted with a vision of herself as a more popular, smarter, prettier girl — but the result is just basically nastiness.

You can see how this would ring true with a teenager, but it’s nowhere near as chilling as the idea of everyone becoming the same, talking the same way, thinking the same way, without originality — the kind of thing that sounds a whole lot like high school.

Similarly, Meg’s deep disappointment with her father and her anger at his inability to solve things once he’s found has mostly disappeared from the story — but it’s that very experience, of discovering that adults can’t always fix the world and knowing you need to take charge yourself, that makes Meg’s journey in the novel so instantly recognizable to every young teen. (Reading those passages in the book, you can’t help but think of the teenage Parkland school shooting survivors.)

In the movie, Meg’s “faults” — one of the most important parts of the novel — are not so much her temper and her self-pity and her shortsightedness; now, her faults are more like timidity and being scared of heights and bullies.

It feels as if the film is afraid to let Meg be a real girl, afraid to unfurl evil’s true capacity and make clear the danger in fighting it. What’s left approaches the level of platitudes. “Love is always there, even if you don’t feel it — it’s always there for you,” Meg’s father tells her when she is small.

“We’re warriors who serve the good and light in the universe,” the Mrs. tell the children. Of tessering, Meg is told that “you won’t feel or see anything when you tesser until you become one with the universe, and yourself.” The children must become “warriors” who are “willing to fight the darkness and make a light for themselves to the world.” Their only conflict is between their own capacity for goodness and the shadowy darkness of IT.

Contrast that with passages like this from the novel, in which Meg finally realizes why she’d been so angry with her father:

“I wanted you to do it all for me. I wanted everything to be all easy and simple. … So I tried to pretend that it was all your fault … because I was scared, and I didn’t want to have to do anything myself—” “But I wanted to do it for you,” Mr. Murry said. “That’s what every parent wants.” He looked into her dark, frightened eyes. “I won’t let you go, Meg. I am going.” “No.” Mrs Whatsit’s voice was sterner than Meg had ever heard it. “You are going to allow Meg the privilege of accepting this danger. You are a wise man, Mr. Murry. You are going to let her go.”

There’s a recognizable authenticity to Meg’s struggles and her father’s limitations in the novel that are much less present in the movie. That’s partly as a result of its relative brevity. But, sacrificed for a message of self-love, it also feels like a serious loss.

A Wrinkle in Time isn’t afraid of spiritual content, but its handling of that material seems indicative of what it believes about its audience

Some of the changes from the book are perfectly reasonable — no movie can (or should) do in two hours what a book can do in hundreds of pages, even if it frustrates fans.

But there’s a kind of liability in broadening out a movie to make it palatable by big movie studio executive standards. Certainly a filmmaker is free to shift the aims of the story to suit her desires. But with a book like Wrinkle , losing some of the specificity of its source material can belie a mistrust in the artist.

In the novel, Christianity lays thickly upon Wrinkle , influenced by L’Engle’s own beliefs (for years she was the writer in residence at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, a progressive Episcopal congregation). In that way and others, the book is like C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series: not blatantly preachy or too ponderously allegorical but integrating long quotations from the Bible and Christian theology into a story that still works whether or not you pick up on the Christian context.

Oprah Winfrey and Storm Reid in A Wrinkle in Time

Much of that Christian content has been excised from the film version of Wrinkle . It’s hard to tell precisely what the thinking was behind this, given the broadly inclusive nature of L’Engle’s Christianity — you’d be hard-pressed to call Wrinkle anything like proselytizing, and because of this, it has been the subject of vehement criticism from some conservative Christians for decades . The movie seems fine with preserving and foregrounding other religious ideas: Figures like Buddha still get quoted in the movie, and there’s some religiously oriented language about becoming one with the universe, alongside a smidge of yoga.

Certainly there’s no effort to appeal to the moviegoing audience that flocks to Christian movies. And that move will naturally, and maybe rightly, incense some of the built-in audience for the book.

But more importantly, it undercuts the story, preserving a more vague spirituality at the expense of any particulars in a tale that’s all about particularity. One wonders while watching the film if Disney underestimates young viewers’ ability to understand that there are different religions (something that L’Engle herself was clearly interested in), many of which are interested in the matters the film addresses, and whether the better choice for someone looking to make a religiously inclusive film might have been to preserve the film’s Christianity but add influences from other systems of belief, rather than smoothing them all out into a vague swirl of “love.”

None of this is necessarily a deal breaker for families who want to go see A Wrinkle in Time , which is part brightly colored positive-attitude fable and part call to a brave but nonsectarian love for everyone. There is something here for the uncertain child in all of us.

But the best-case scenario is that those who see the movie will go home and read the books, and experience the bigger, richer, more brilliant world that L’Engle created, in all its strangeness and smartness and periodic tables and quotations from old, confusing texts and passages in which Meg voices her petulance and anger.

That’s why, at the end of the film, I was left with a lingering uneasiness about its broadness, the ways it removed what was most specifically chilling and weird about the story. It makes me wonder how much Disney trusts its young audiences to be smart and able to understand the world.

I wonder whether the movie’s attempts to celebrate our differences are rendered merely surface-level by what it dropped from the plot. And I wonder, if what Disney was after was the fuzzy sense of the need to love one another, without some of the darker elements A Wrinkle in Time offers, whether L’Engle’s book was the right one to adapt.

A Wrinkle in Time opens in theaters on March 9.

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DVD & Streaming

A Wrinkle in Time

Action/Adventure , Drama , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

In Theaters

March 9, 2018
Storm Reid as Meg; Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Which; Reese Witherspoon as Mrs. Whatsit; Mindy Kaling as Mrs. Who; Levi Miller as Calvin; Deric McCabe as Charles Wallace; Chris Pine as Mr. Murry; Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Mrs. Murry; Zach Galifianakis as the Happy Medium

Home Release Date

June 5, 2018
Ava DuVernay

Distributor

Movie review.

It was a dark and stormy night.

Meg Murry knows all about such nights. In a way, her life’s been an endless dark, stormy night for the last four years, ever since her father disappeared.

He never even said goodbye.

Maybe he couldn’t. The NASA scientist was working on something big—exploring the concept of the tesseract , a so-called “wrinkle in time” where space folds in on itself, allowing rapid transit between stars, constellations, maybe whole galaxies.

Perhaps Mr. Murry found a way to make the tesseract work. Perhaps he was sent by the government on a daring mission. Perhaps. Or perhaps Mr. Murry simply … left. Gossips speculate that Mr. Murry tired of his wife and children and deserted them.

For Meg, the reason doesn’t much matter. Her father’s gone, and she’s never been the same. She lashes out at school, fights with her classmates. She feels awkward and ugly and desperately unintelligent. On the anniversary of her father’s disappearance, someone sticks a note on her locker: “Happy anniversary,” it says. “If only you’d disappear too!”

Back at home, Meg goes downstairs and finds her younger brother, Charles Wallace, heating up milk. Always good to be prepared , he says. Sure enough, Meg’s mother soon comes down, and there’s enough milk for her, too. Then there’s a knock on the door.

In traipses a rather alarming red-haired woman wearing a gown made from, it appears, stolen sheets. She’s a strange one, she is, and a stranger to boot—a stranger to everyone, apparently, but young Charles Wallace. He calls her Mrs. Whatsit.

She visits for a spell, tossing off strange little sentences here and there, admitting that wild, stormy nights like this are her glory. But before she departs, she turns to Mrs. Murry and says, “By the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.”

Then she’s gone, leaving the gaping Mrs. Murry behind.

Meg doesn’t know it just yet, but she’s just taken her first step on a galaxy-spanning adventure involving herself, Charles Wallace, a popular boy from school named Calvin and three of the strangest women Meg’s ever seen. If all goes well, they might just rescue Meg and Charles Wallace’s father. Oh, and save the universe while they’re at it.

But it won’t be easy: Many a dark and stormy night is on its way.

Positive Elements

A Wrinkle in Time is a curious bird, an intimate tale of family told on a galactic canvas.

We’re told that Mrs. Whatsit and her two associates, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which, are creatures of the light—celestial beings who battle darkness wherever they find it. But they do so with help: They mention that some of the greatest “warriors” against the darkness have come from Earth (rattling off names such as Einstein, Marie Curie and Gandhi), and these women would like Meg to join the fight now, too.

Meg, desperately insecure, initially doubts her role in this cosmic battle. But the plural “Mrs.” (as they’re called) encourage her to believe in herself—her inner beauty, her intelligence, her uniqueness. The wise Mrs. Which reminds Meg how improbable it is that she’s even here at all—how many events throughout the ages had to come together to make Meg “just exactly the way you are.” They encourage her to marshal not just her strengths, but her faults . Even her pain can become a catalyst for growth and hope, they say.

The tesseract, we eventually learn, is launched through love. Curiously, Mr. Murry makes this breakthrough as he watches his wife and adopted son, Charles Wallace, through a window—catalyzing the tesser that, seconds later, rips him away from his family. Elsewhere during the movie, Meg’s love for her family—first for her father, then for Charles Wallace—literally pulls her toward them, always at great risk to herself. And while I don’t want to give away too much, this film is suggests love is indeed the greatest power in the universe.

We also witness some nice family moments and hear some affirming messages about adoption. And the movie sprinkles plenty of wise little adages throughout. For instance:

“Love is always there, even if you don’t feel it,” Meg’s dad tells her.

“Of course, we can’t take any credit for our talents,” Mrs. Whatsit says. “It’s how we use them that counts.”

“It’s OK to fear the answers, Meg,” someone called the Happy Medium says. “But you can’t avoid ’em.”

I could go on, but it’s time to go on with the review.

Spiritual Elements

Those who’ve read Madeleine L’Engle’s novel A Wrinkle in Time may remember that, while not an explicitly Christian story (and Jesus, some argue, is put on a par with other secular and religious leaders), it contains a considerable level of Christian thought. L’Engle regularly quotes the Bible throughout that book.

Alas, most of those explicit references have been torn away here, replaced (at least superficially) with a certain unmoored spiritual tang.

Mrs. Who (who speaks mainly through other people’s words) quotes Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran, who was raised as a Christian but who also was influenced by Sufi Islamic mysticism. She quotes Buddha and the Islamic poet Rumi, too: “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” Mrs. Who emphasizes that God made us unique for a reason, and she says that pain can be an instrument for growth that can help marshal our apparent weaknesses for good.

To locate Meg and Charles Wallace’s father, the Happy Medium leads the children and the three Mrs. in a mystical, yoga-like ceremony. These elements, along with oft-repeated exhortations to “believe in yourself” and to embrace “oneness with the universe” could leave viewers with a New Age-y aftertaste.

That does not appear to be the creators’ intention, according to Wrinkle in Time producer Jim Whitaker, though they were aiming to make the film more inclusive. The filmmakers wanted the book’s spiritual themes to be “reflected widely in the movie for people of all faiths to be able to see themselves in it,” Whitaker told me.

We also see telekinetic forces are at work, and one character can apparently read minds well enough to see everyone’s innermost fears. Mrs. Who’s glasses have a bit of mystical power in them, as well.

Sexual Content

Calvin and Meg are attracted to one another, but the closest we get to them being a “thing” (apart from a few lingering looks) is a hug here, some hand-holding there and a few compliments regarding Meg’s hair. Mr. and Mrs. Murry kiss, with each expressing love for the another.

We hear vague speculation that Mr. Murry “disappeared” with another woman. A beach scene includes some women in bikinis and shirtless guys. Mrs. Whatsit and the Happy Medium are an item, though Whatsit says that, after a billion years, they avoid labels. (They compliment each other on their outfits, and Whatsit calls the Happy Medium “cute.”)

Violent Content

Meg suffers the brunt of the movie’s sometimes perilous battering. She’s hoisted, pulled and thrown about by strange vines or tendrils. She and Calvin initially flee what seems to be a sentient storm, but then climb into a hollow tree trunk so that the storm (which transforms into a mighty tornado) can hurl them over a gigantic wall. Meg has trouble tessering, too, often coming out of this curious state of travel in serious pain and unable to move. (Mrs. Whatsit kicks her once afterwards, to confirm that she’s still alive.) She and others get pulled down a dark hallway by some unseen force.

Meg smacks someone in the face with a basketball. (Her mother later instructs her to write an apology letter.) Calvin falls from an incredible height, saved from certain death by sentient wildflowers. A character seems to sport glowing cracks in his face for a time, for some reason. The entity IT is referenced once as “the Happy Sadist.”

Crude or Profane Language

Drug and alcohol content, other negative elements.

A dark evil is infiltrating Earth, causing many problems: One girl suffers from an eating disorder (her “eating rules” are posted on a bedroom wall). Calvin’s father berates him for a poor report card, calling him an “idiot.” Ruffians make fun of an apparently homeless guy and rifle through his stuff. Children sometimes talk back to authority figures (though the movie does not encourage that behavior), and Meg walks out on her principal.

It’s not easy to make a movie of such a beloved—and such a weird —children’s book. Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 classic has resisted efforts at cinematic translation for decades, and perhaps it was foolhardy for anyone to try. But give this Disney movie’s makers credit. Boy, did they try.

Producer Jim Whitaker told me that the production, led by director Ava DuVernay, “swung for the fences, I think in every department and every way.” And A Wrinkle in Time is indeed an incredibly daring movie. As Disney has been doing since Snow White , the studio bought the story and used it as the basis for the story it wanted to tell, leaving some of the book’s characters, scenes, themes and even feel on the cutting room floor.

The result is a bit of a messy tesseract itself.

The narrative here, while visually stunning, zooms from scene to scene with barely a reason and nary a structure, dropping us off on strange planets feeling breathless and unmoored. Sometimes things just don’t make much sense.

And the decision to strip the book’s Christian elements is mystifying to me, given the weight those elements have in the novel. It’s obvious that for L’Engle, those Christian echoes were part of the point. To excise the movie of explicit Christian allusions robs the story of some of its power, the very themes that made the novel so resonant to begin with.

At one juncture in the L’Engle’s story, for example, Dr. Murry gives Meg this exhortation, quoting Romans 8:28: “We were sent here for something,” he says. “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose.”

Contrast that with what I think is the film’s final line: “I believe in me.” Hey, it’s good to believe in yourself and all. But in comparison to the book’s clear Christian themes, the movie’s message feels overly light and perhaps a bit dispiriting.

And the thing is, DuVernay knows how to handle explicit faith elements in film. She did so masterfully in Selma , which focused on a critical moment in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s career. King’s Christian faith wasn’t an afterthought in Selma : It was central to the protagonist’s character and motivation, and I don’t think that anyone was offended by it. As it is, Disney’s attempt to be inoffensive may, ironically, offend those who could’ve been the movie’s biggest supporters: fans of the books and Christians.

But for a minute, let me set aside what the movie could’ve been and concentrate on what the movie is. And that movie is, at least in terms of its core messages, pretty good.

Meg is a wonderful, charismatic young heroine who pushes through her anxieties and insecurities not only to save her father, but to save the universe, too. This quest pits her and the forces of light—of truth and freedom and above all, love—against a dark entity that, like Satan, twists and contorts those values into something almost unrecognizable, something that uses our heroes’ own doubts and fears against them. The film shows us a family that’s both caring and broken, and it allows us to see how much they love each other even when they’re sometimes at their most unlovable. Maybe most importantly, A Wrinkle in Time still points, albeit in more subtle ways than the book, to timeless Christian truths: We are loved. We were made for a reason. As insignificant as we sometimes feel, we have purpose.

A Wrinkle in Time is no masterpiece. But it still has a wrinkle or two of its own that families can unpack and discuss. And that’s a wrinkle I can live with.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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A Wrinkle in Time Parent Guide

This adaption of a best-selling novel will likely disappoint both newcomers to the story and fans of the classic..

Based on the classic children's novel, Meg (Storm Reid), her brother (Deric McCabe) and her friend (Levi Miller) are sent on an intergalactic mission to find her father (Chris Pine) who mysteriously disappeared while doing scientific research about time and space travel.

Release date March 9, 2018

Run Time: 110 minutes

Official Movie Site

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The guide to our grades, parent movie review by donna gustafson.

I went into the screening of A Wrinkle in Time with great expectations. The movie is based on a best-selling novel by Madeleine L’Engle that was one of my favorites as a youth, and one that I read to my own children. Although it was obvious from watching the trailer that the filmmakers were putting their own touches on the classic tale, I was open to seeing where that interpretation would go.

Directed by Ava DuVernay, whose other work focuses on African American themes ( Selma , 13th ), it should have come as no surprise that she would add racial diversity to what was originally an all-white story. While this casting pallet really doesn’t color the intent of the characters, the difference in agenda between L’Engle and DuVernay really does change the themes painted in the plot.

Two things happen at this point of despair: A smart and popular boy from school named Calvin (Levi Miller) shows up wanting to befriend Meg and Charles Wallace, and three ethereal beings (played by Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and Oprah Winfrey) appear offering to help the trio find Mr. Murray. After hesitantly accepting the invitation, Meg, her brother and their new pal find themselves wrinkling time, traveling through space, and on a dangerous rescue mission. The quest will challenge the talents and faults of each individual as they try to combat the dark forces of the universe.

The set-up is similar in both book and film, however, the lessons that are learned on the journey vary. L’Engle wrote an allegory that tries to balance science and religion, focuses on the bonds of family, and enshrines the strength of love. DuVernay and the screenwriters (Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell) use her framework to promote girl power and reprimand fathers.

And it won’t just be fans of the novel that find the film lacking. The pacing is flawed, spending too much time frolicking in fantasy worlds, and not enough time building tensions and resolving conflicts. This makes it hard for the audience to engage in the emotions that should accompany scenes of peril, moments of triumph, depths of disappointment and realization of joy. Nor does it help that the other-worldly characters are so ham-fisted in imparting their moral messages.

Thankfully, content issues focus mostly on some non-graphic violent depictions that are best suited for older children and teens. Still, the greatest reason for regret in this expensive Disney production is the way an exceptional story, and a capable cast and crew, didn’t manage to iron out the wrinkles in their execution. Instead, all they have turned out is a mediocre adventure yarn.

About author

Donna Gustafson

A wrinkle in time rating & content info.

Why is A Wrinkle in Time rated PG? A Wrinkle in Time is rated PG by the MPAA for thematic elements and some peril.

Violence: Infrequent portrayals of verbal bullying and exclusion of a child at school. A child deliberately throws a ball at another child’s face. Within a fantasy context, children are in situations where they cannot trust adults, during this period an adult character convinces a young child to follow him, later the child exhibits changed behavior and is hostile toward others. Characters are thrown about by others who have metaphysical forces. Child characters are in peril and separated from parents. A child falls but is saved prior to reaching the ground.

Sexual Content: It is implied an adult female character is momentarily naked, no details are seen. A married man and woman kiss. Characters embrace.

Profanity: Some name calling is heard between children at school.

Alcohol / Drug Use: None noted.

Page last updated June 4, 2018

A Wrinkle in Time Parents' Guide

One message within this movie involves a father whose children feel he has been neglectful by putting too much time into his work. Within the context of this movie, do you feel this is a fair judgement? Can you think of other movies where fathers are depicted as being more interested in work than their children? Are there movies you can think of that depict mothers in a similar situation?

In the story A Wrinkle In Time , a “tesseract” is a means by which people can travel instantly through space. (In reality, the term tesseract describes a four-dimensional analog of the cube or “octachoron”.) The fictional idea plays with some actual theories in physics. If you want to dive into your own tesseract adventure – and don’t mind some deep reading – begin with this post on quantum entanglement by Ethan Siegel and the discussion of whether it can be used for “faster than light” (FTL) communications. (In short, it can’t.) Want more? Move on to Chad Orzel’s further commentary on Siegel’s explanations. If you click on all the links within the post, your head should be spinning!

“It was a dark and stormy night.” If you began your English paper with that sentence, you’d probably get a bad mark. But author Madeleine L’Engle still chose to begin her book, A Wrinkle In Time , with this overused cliché. Who was the first? It was English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton who penned the now-classic opening sentence in his novel Paul Clifford .

A Wrinkle In Time is a book that met many challenges to being published. It was still on the Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books list (check #90) at the American Library Association surveying the last decade (2000-2009). Many feel the book pits science against Christianity. Yet others feel the book has a faith-based origin and promoted religion. How do you feel about the book? (If you haven’t read it, we still feel it’s far better than this movie.) Is it healthy to have differences of opinion and perspectives?

This isn’t the first time A Wrinkle In Time has been put to screen. In 2003 a TV movie adaptation was made, and received poor reviews – including one from Madeleine L’Engle who said, “I expected it to be bad, and it is.” Artistically, we at Parent Previews felt the same way about this adaptation. Are some books best left to the reader’s imagination? Here are some reasons Devan Coggan at Entertainment Weekly considers it a difficult project to take on.

News About "A Wrinkle in Time"

Based on a novel from a series of books by Madeleine L'Engle . As a youth and a mother, A Wrinkle in Time was one of my favorite reads. It tells the story of Meg Murry and her brother Charles Wallace who set off on a journey through time and space to find their father. Also on the quest is Meg's friend Calvin. The three youngsters all have special abilities, and consequently often feel like misfits. Yet as they work together, with the help of three extra-terristial beings, they discover how to use their talents, when to accept their limitations, and what gifts are universally important. In this movie version of the novel, the Murry family has been cast as a mixed-race. (Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays the mother, and Chris Pine the father.) Although that's not the case with the original tale, it will be interesting to see how that dynamic is incorporated into the script. Storm Reid takes on the role of Meg, Deric McCabe is Charles Wallace and Levi Miller is Calvin. Reese Witherspoon, Oprah Winfrey and Mindy Kaling play the otherworldly guides, bringing some real star power to this science fiction story.

The most recent home video release of A Wrinkle in Time movie is June 5, 2018. Here are some details…

Home Video Notes: A Wrinkle in Time Release Date: 4 June 2018 A Wrinkle in Time releases to home video (Blu-ray/DVD/Digital Copy) with the following bonus features: - A Journey Through Time – Take an up-close look at the making of this magnificent movie with Director Ava DuVernay, Oprah Winfrey, and the cast and crew. - Deleted Scenes (with optional director audio commentary) - Audio Commentary - Bloopers - Original Songs/Music Videos

Related news about A Wrinkle in Time

Production Begins on A Wrinkle In Time

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Screen Rant

A wrinkle in time: the most brutal reviews.

Unfortunately for moviegoers both young and old, the early reviews for Disney's A Wrinkle in Time are far nastier than anticipated.

Unfortunately for moviegoers both young and old, the early reviews for Disney's A Wrinkle in Time are far nastier than expected. It's actually the second live-action take on Madeleine L'Engle's beloved fantasy novel, as the award-winning book was previously adapted into a made-for-TV ABC movie back in 2003. This latest adaptation won't be so easily forgotten, however. It's already gained quite a bit of notoriety for being the first live-action film with a $100 million dollar budget to be directed by a woman of color. Filmmaker Ava DuVernay ranks among the most promising up-and-coming talents in Hollywood, having previously helmed Oscar-nominated films Selma and 13th . Couple that with all the talent A Wrinkle in Time has going for it in front of the camera (Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Chris Pine headline a star-studded cast ), and the new adaptation seemed primed to become the next big thing in cinemas.

But then folks actually got a look at it. Early reactions to A Wrinkle in Time were surprisingly mixed , and the first wave of reviews were even worse . Despite all the supporters DuVernay's film has in its corner, there's no getting around the fact that the movie itself is a bit of a mess.

Related: A Wrinkle in Time Review - Disney’s Latest is a Beautiful Misfire

We should point out that we usually reserve these brutal review roundups for films that have been universally panned by critics (or close to it), and that isn't quite the case for A Wrinkle in Time . The movie currently sports a 42% rating over on Rotten Tomatoes based on 78 reviews, indicating a mixed to negative reaction overall. But when big-budget adaptations of beloved novels fall this far short of expectations, hard truths need to be faced. Buckle up for a bevy of attacks on poor CGI, glaring plot holes, and missed themes from the source material as we check out The Most Brutal Reviews Of A Wrinkle In Time .

How bad is A Wrinkle in Time? It's so bad even Oprah Winfrey, Queen of the Universe, playing the Queen of the Universe, couldn't save this cinematic disaster of epic proportions ... The Guides are meant to be at funny at times, and fail miserably in that regard. They provide the story with enough self-serious and pretentious New Age "philosophy" and other spiritual mumbo jumbo as to make one nauseous. The movie drinks its own Kool-Aid. It is saturated with self-importance. The entire film is sorely lacking in any sense of humor or wit. It plods like an elephant through its inexplicable and hard to follow story line, audience be damned ... Wrinkle could be unfavorably compared to the Wizard of Oz - lacking its charm, humor and clever characters. It will stain the careers of all those involved. Years from now a college course will be taught on what went wrong with this $100 million-dollar movie. In that sense, it is an iconic film. Like Heaven's Gate or Ishtar. -- Cleveland Plain Dealer The film has the feel of an iPad video pawned off on a toddler so Dad can make comforting mac and cheese – here’s a bite-sized lesson about loving yourself and a jumble of pretty colors. -- Guardian (UK)

Surely there must be something positive to say about the production, but thoughts of an Attack of the 50-foot Oprah sequel notwithstanding, calling this an incomprehensible mess would be a compliment. Add to this the frustration brought on by sound effects that drown out crucial dialog passages, and the only thing you’ll take away from the experience is a wrinkle in your ass. -- San Diego Reader

...a crushing wave of eye-candy and mediocre technique. Considering the changes that were made to the story and the schmaltzy platitudes liberally spooned out by screenwriter Jennifer Lee, one gets the feeling that she and the director either didn’t fully grasp the material or didn’t think the audience could. To make matters worse, it’s hobbled by some surprisingly bad film-making choices. The CGI and production design are shockingly bland ... Almost every scene is so saturated with clumsily delivered ‘believe in yourself’ mantras that it becomes monotonous, meaningless and even creepy. -- Dark Horizons Barely coherent, overburdened with unimpressive special effects and hobbled by unremittingly bad acting, it will confound and bore children and adults in equal measure ... the narrative is presented in such a careless, chaotic fashion that it’s impossible to make much sense of what’s happening ... A Wrinkle in Time is a waste of yours. -- One Guy's Opinion

So A Wrinkle in Time hits that unfortunate un-sweet spot common to big-budget science-fiction/fantasy, where the spectacle feels more summarized than experienced. (Not helping much: Ramin Djawadi’s oddly terrible score, screaming emotions like an overgrown thought balloon covering up its own illustration.) Almost nothing works ... Depressingly, A Wrinkle in Time has less in common with its spiky protagonist than her plastic doppelganger, flattened into familiar wonders, a sincere attempt at empowerment crushed into preachy dullness. -- Entertainment Weekly

DuVernay fails utterly in her search for urgency in this story and cannot concoct a threat any more palpable than the “darkness” of which Mrs. Which speaks. The director loses herself in static conversation scenes and extreme close-ups of her beautiful players. That’s soap opera/TV movie camera work and no, that’s not a compliment. The “Hero’s (heroine’s) Journey” quest takes a back seat, when it’s given any seat at all. The heroine? Meh. Jake Lloyd with curls. -- Movie Nation A Wrinkle in Time is wildly uneven, weirdly suspenseless and tonally all over the place, relying on wall-to-wall music to supply the missing emotional connection and trowel over huge plot holes. -- Variety

The scenes just drag on and seem to marvel at its special effects — which aren't that strong to begin with — instead of moving the story forward. At times the movie's dramatic moments have the feeling of a cheesy Hallmark Channel movie rather than something that came from the most powerful movie studio in Hollywood. -- Business Insider

...a bad children's version of a Marvel movie sprinkled with Narnia dust. It's about as deep as knock knock joke, introducing ideas it does little if anything to explore. -- Reeling Reviews

Next: 10 Movies We’re Looking Forward To - March 2018

A WRINKLE IN TIME (2018)

"old time new age".

What You Need To Know:

Miscellaneous Immorality: Father leaves family and gets stuck on another planet and children may get scared from multiple scenes that show characters being manipulated.

More Detail:

A WRINKLE IN TIME follows Meg, a young girl who is in search of her father, with the help of three celestial beings, a friend and her younger brother. A WRINKLE IN TIME is based on a beloved book by Madeline L’Engle, but veers far away from the book’s original Christian allegory and presents New Age messages and a plotline that will leave viewers confused.

Meg Murry and her father are very close. For years, her father, Dr. Alex Murry, has been trying to find the way to travel to outer space by mentally folding time and space, or tessering. One day her father goes missing, and Meg and her adopted brother, Charles Wallace, and her mother, Kate, are distraught. Suddenly, everything seems meaningless, including school and friends. Meg falls behind and is teased constantly at school.

One day, the Murry family is visited by a celestial being named Mrs.Whatsit. Mrs. Whatsit tells them that tessering is real. Kate is suspicious of Mrs.Whatsit and shoos her out of their house. Shortly thereafter, Charles Wallace leads Meg and her friend Calvin to another Celestial being, Mrs. Who. Mrs. Who only speaks in quotes, including quotes from Gandhi, Buddha, Rumi, and others. Later, the three meet Mrs. Which, the third celestial being. Mrs. Which is larger than life and tells the group they can go find Meg’s father by tessering together.

All of them travel to a beautiful planet. When they arrive, they find some flowers that speak in color and give them a hint of where Meg’s father may be. Then, Mrs. Whatsit transforms into a giant leaf creature and flies Meg, Charles Wallace and Calvin toward the mountains. A huge black dark force knocks Calvin off of Mrs. Whatsit, and the flowers save him. The black dark force is evil and called “the It,” and the group now realizes they must stop the evil from getting to Meg’s father.

Mrs. Whatsit tells the others she has a friend that is a Happy Medium who can give them advice. The Happy Medium lives in a cave where the ground moves, and the only way to stay balanced on the moving ground is to meditate in a yoga pose and stay centered with the universe. The Happy Medium also tells Meg to talk about her father and remember when he left her. She is so crushed, she feels she can’t talk about it. The group tessers to “the It” planet. There, Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Who leave Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin on this planet to find their own way and stop the evil from consuming Meg’s father.

A WRINKLE IN TIME is an extremely convoluted, confusing, abstract movie. Often, it’s very hard to understand the dialogue and follow the plotline. It seems as if the filmmakers spent most of their time focusing on the CGI aspects of the movie, in order to create a great spectacle, rather than working on the story. The costuming echoes the dress of palm readers and crystal ball gazers. The problem with all this is that viewers will not feel the need to continue watching, if they can’t connect with the story and the characters. Though this is the case, there are some visually pleasing scenes.

A WRINKLE IN TIME is based on the best-selling novel by Madeline L’Engle. However, many of the faith statements and themes in Madeline’s book aren’t included in the movie. Instead, the movie adds lots of New Age content, including an emphasis on being one with the universe and the energy people create with positive or negative thoughts. At one point, one character mentions every “spiritual,” “religious,” and historical icon, but seems to exclude Jesus Christ, as if Christianity was the one thing they didn’t want to include. In the book, however, Jesus is the iconic figure.

Overall, A WRINKLE IN TIME has a positive moral, redemptive message about a relationship between a father and a daughter being restored, as well as a clear picture of good versus evil. Though this is the case, the movie suggests it’s in our own power that we can accomplish good, rather than realizing that it is only in God’s power we can be renewed and transformed. Also, some of the scenes may be too scary for younger children.

Now more than ever we’re bombarded by darkness in media, movies, and TV. Movieguide® has fought back for almost 40 years, working within Hollywood to propel uplifting and positive content. We’re proud to say we’ve collaborated with some of the top industry players to influence and redeem entertainment for Jesus. Still, the most influential person in Hollywood is you. The viewer.

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A wrinkle in time, common sense media reviewers.

Classic sci-fi story still inspires and gets kids thinking.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

This book contains lots of science, but more impor

There are many important themes in A Wrinkle in Ti

The book is chock full of great role models. Meg i

The book has suspense and a few scary moments. The

Mild flirtation and a kiss.

Educational Value

This book contains lots of science, but more importantly, it's a great way to discuss topics of conformity and individuality.

Positive Messages

There are many important themes in A Wrinkle in Time : the importance of friendship, loyalty and individuality chief among them. This book celebrates kids who are a bit different, it sends positive messages about thinking for yourself and about the bonds of siblings.

Positive Role Models

The book is chock full of great role models. Meg is a strong, persuasive and brave heroine. Her mother is a scientist. Her friend Calvin is a model of loyalty and her brother Charles Wallace an example of how cool you can be if you aren't typically "cool."

Violence & Scariness

The book has suspense and a few scary moments. The children confront an evil, disembodied brain that controls a planet.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that A Wrinkle in Time is one of the great works of literature for kids. Besides being an exciting story, its messages of individuality, nonconformity, friendship and courage have inspired generations of readers. This is a wonderful book for kids who've ever felt "different" or lonely or who have wrestled with loss. It celebrates the power of individuality, bravery, and love. It's been adapted for the screen twice, once as a 2004 TV movie and once in 2018 as a big-budget Disney blockbuster . There's a good audiobook version read by Hope Davis.

Where to Read

Community reviews.

Parents say (31)
Kids say (103)

Based on 31 parent reviews

Beautiful, thought-provoking, and charming...except for when it's not (don't let bad reviews scare you, this works for many personalities, read on to see if you're a match)

What's the story.

In A WRINKLE IN TIME, Meg's father, an eminent physicist, has been missing for two years. One night a strange old woman, Mrs. Whatsit, appears, "blown off course" while she, along with Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which, was tessering, or taking a shortcut through time and space. They take Meg, her little brother Charles Wallace, and their new friend Calvin, to rescue Dr. Murry, who is a prisoner on a planet ruled by IT, a giant pulsating brain that controls the minds of everyone on the planet. Charles Wallace also falls under IT's control, and when Meg finds her father, she discovers that he is not the invincible protector she thought he was. She must not only come to terms with this realization, but find a way to rescue them both.

Is It Any Good?

For many children, reading this book is a turning point in their intellectual lives, opening to them worlds of science and literary complexity. Those who like action and adventure enjoy its science fiction story, filled with strange creatures and Meg's showdown with IT. Preteens of both sexes can relate to the coming-of-age theme, with a hint of romance, and commentary on the value of individuality over conformity. And kids who aren't terribly popular enjoy watching an outcast become a hero, and doing so by finding that her faults are also her strengths.

Grown scientists who read A Wrinkle in Time as a child recall it as being the first book that encouraged openness to imaginative speculation, the root of all scientific inquiry and creativity. Parents who want to expose their children to women and girls who are passionate about math and science would do well to slip their child a copy of this book. Not only do Meg and her mother fit this particular bill, but Meg is also the one who wages the battle between good and evil.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about individuality, conformity, and personal growth. What does A Wrinkle in Time suggest about these ideas?

How is the Murry family different from most people in their community? At the beginning of the book, do you find them strange, and does your opinion change over the course of the story?

How does Meg change over the course of her adventure? What character strengths does she demonstrate?

Book Details

Author : Madeleine L'Engle
Genre : Science Fiction
Topics : Adventures , Brothers and Sisters , Great Boy Role Models , Great Girl Role Models , Science and Nature , Space and Aliens
Book type : Fiction
Publisher : Yearling Books
Publication date : January 1, 1962
Publisher's recommended age(s) : 9 - 12
Number of pages : 240
Award : Newbery Medal and Honors
Last updated : June 19, 2019

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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The 'Wrinkle in Time' reviews are in — and critics say it's a disappointing mess with the best intentions

Disney's "A Wrinkle in Time" is proving to be a disappointment for movie critics.
Many were hyped for Ava DuVernay's $100 million movie (a major milestone for black women).
But many critics agree that the movie's pacing and storytelling is flawed.
Others believe the cultural impact of "A Wrinkle in Time" outshines the imperfections.

"A Wrinkle in Time" is a new big-budget Disney movie based on the classic 1962 novel by Madeleine L'Engle. Though critics had high hopes for Ava DuVernay's $100 million budgeted film, the first reviews reveal almost unanimous disappointment.

INSIDER's review of "A Wrinkle in Time" found the movie to be oddly paced (matching with the original book's main issue) and lacking a compelling antagonist.

Here's what the other critics are saying:

DuVernay's voice got lost in the ambition of her project

"On the evidence, astrophysical abstraction isn't her forte. She's overawed, not by her source — L'Engle's writing is dryly understated, an Einsteinian joke on classic myths and fairy tales, its three witches out of a Shakespeare stock company — but by the momentous responsibility thrust upon her. As the first African-American woman with a budget of $100 million, she seems to have set out to make the most empowering movie of all time. Transcendentally empowering. Oprah-level empowering. And that can really mess with your voice."

— Vulture's David Edelstein

The movie's cultural significance makes its failure even more of a bummer

"What a shame, then, that the end product of that history-making work is such a mess. DuVernay can't seem to settle on a consistent visual or narrative cadence. Her camera is all over the place, hurtling in for woozy close-ups and then rearing back to reveal what is meant to be vast splendor but is often just bland C.G.I. prettiness. (Sometimes it’s not even that pretty.)"

— Vanity Fair's Richard Lawson

Many of the dramatic moments come off as just cheesy

"At times the movie's dramatic moments have the feeling of a cheesy Hallmark Channel movie rather than something that came from the most powerful movie studio in Hollywood."

— Business Insider's Jason Guerrasio

Reese Witherspoon and Storm Reid as Mrs. Whatsit and Meg Murray. Disney

The celestial being characters are off-kilter and bland.

"The three 'Mrs.' characters, who change makeup and wardrobe styles incessantly, are unequally balanced: Witherspoon has far more dialogue and screen time than the others and before long becomes annoyingly overbearing; Winfrey kind of floats through much of it making banal pronouncements, such as, 'If we do not act soon, darkness will fall across the universe'; and Kaling has unfairly little to say or do."

— The Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy

It's a campy mess

"The spectacle feels more summarized than experienced [...] Almost nothing works, but there are bursts of real camp energy."

— Entertainment Weekly's Darren Franich

The movie fails to fix issues of pacing found in the book

"Unfortunately, the movie version of 'A Wrinkle in Time' made several important updates to the original material while keeping the jarring pacing of the book. The cuts between scenes or shots felt both stylized and accidental at the same time, leaving a sense of incompletion or muddled intent."

— INSIDER's Kim Renfro

If you don't overhype it, "Wrinkle In Time" might still be your cup of tea

"Let this be a warning: Keep your expectations in check, and you might be pleasantly surprised. Despite such bold choices as casting Oprah Winfrey as an all-wise celestial being and rejecting the antiquated assumption that the lead characters ought to be white, 'A Wrinkle in Time' is wildly uneven, weirdly suspenseless and tonally all over the place, relying on wall-to-wall music to supply the missing emotional connection and trowel over huge plot holes."

— Variety's Peter Debruge

The movie serves up an important message in its flawed protagonist

"'A Wrinkle in Time' is for all the girls – and boys, and non-binary kids, and teens and adults and the elderly – who've ever been a Meg. It's a flawed film that entreats us to love flawed things, up to and including our very own selves."

— Mashable's Angie Han

Mindy Kaling as Mrs. Who in "A Wrinkle in Time." Disney

"a wrinkle in time" will endear itself to a new generation of youngsters.

"'A Wrinkle in Time' is just weird and wonderful enough to generate a cult following, and it's the kind of movie that the kids of 2018 are going to remember with genuine affection and wonder when they become the adults of 2035."

— The Wrap's Alonso Duralde

It ditches the book's religious tones and amps up the creativity.

"Jesus is out, self-worth is in, and it's coming for your children via an $103-million orgy of special effects that starts with a giant astral projection of Oprah and only gets more insane from there. At one point, Reese Witherspoon transforms into a giant piece of flying kale."

— Indiewire's David Ehrlich

The movie is imperfect but still important

"Is 'A Wrinkle In Time' a perfect film? No, it is not — but what the movie provides is a broad perspective through a series of whimsical events about light fighting darkness and love being the best weapon wielded against evil. It may not get there in a perfectly wrapped bow, but it tells the story in a way that as a fan I can appreciate — and as a critic, I can also respect."

— Black Girl Nerds' Jamie Broadnax

And its flawed execution won't ultimately matter to everyone

"While Meg Murray lives in a fictional universe, she represents the boundless possibilities of the heroic children and teens in the news today. Even if it wasn't perfect, 'A Wrinkle In Time' is giving leaders of tomorrow permission to say, 'Like Meg, I can be anything I want.'"

— Marie Claire's Yolanda Machado

"A Wrinkle in Time" is in theaters Friday. You can read INSIDER's full review here .

Follow INSIDER on Facebook .

Watch: 39 details you may have missed in Tarantino's 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood'

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COMMENTS

A Wrinkle in Time
A Wrinkle in Time is a fantasy adventure film based on the classic novel by Madeleine L'Engle, starring Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Mindy Kaling. Follow the journey of Meg, Charles, and ...
A Wrinkle in Time movie review (2018)
"A Wrinkle in Time" arrives in theaters during the same week that U.S. viewers observed the 50th anniversary of the premiere of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," a beloved series that was all about respecting the space, the wishes, and the feelings of others. There are many points in "A Wrinkle in Time" where the characters' journeys suggest a big-budget CGI version of that show's regular ...
Review: 'A Wrinkle in Time' Gives a Child of the Universe Powerful
A Wrinkle in Time. Directed by Ava DuVernay. Adventure, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi. PG. 1h 49m. By A.O. Scott. March 7, 2018. What I remember most about "A Wrinkle in Time" is my second-grade ...
A Wrinkle in Time Movie Review
6. It. In the book, the It is in a room on a dais and is a telepathic brain. In the movie, It, is a large expansive brain (so big it seems like a weird planet) the kids walk on. It just didn't seem gross or creepy like the book. 7. The climactic scene isn't close to what happens in the book.
A Wrinkle in Time (2018)
A Wrinkle in Time: Directed by Ava DuVernay. With Storm Reid, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling. After the disappearance of her scientist father, three peculiar beings send Meg, her brother, and her friend to space in order to find him.
'A Wrinkle in Time' Review
Rated PG, 110 minutes. A Wrinkle in Time. Ava DuVernay. Mindy Kaling. Oprah Winfrey. Reese Witherspoon. 'A Wrinkle in Time,' Ava DuVernay's adaptation of the classic children's novel, boasts a ...
A Wrinkle in Time (2018)
A Wrinkle in Time never really planted its feet into a specific feel. It seemed to take itself super seriously, but what was happening on screen didn't match up. The score really didn't help. The movie was scored as a dramatic, serious, epic, however, on screen it was kids running around to "save the world".
'A Wrinkle In Time' Review: Ava DuVernay Delivers A Unique And ...
Disney's A Wrinkle in Time represents a long-overdue milestone being passed. The fact that the film's director, Ava DuVernay of Selma and 13th, is the first woman of color to helm a Hollywood film ...
A Wrinkle in Time reviews: Here's what critics think
A Wrinkle in Time is the very definition of a noble failure. It looks great and features a cast to die for, but it lurches from one awkwardly-staged episodic moment to the next, with little in the ...
A Wrinkle in Time (2018 film)
A Wrinkle in Time is a 2018 American science fantasy adventure film directed by Ava DuVernay and written by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell, based on Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 novel of the same name.Produced by Walt Disney Pictures and Whitaker Entertainment, the story follows a young girl who, with the help of three astral travelers, sets off on a quest to find her missing father.
A Wrinkle in Time review: a movie for tweens that doesn't trust them
There are at least two ways to view Ava DuVernay's new adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time. The first is as an inspiring, imaginative movie about growing into generosity and confidence, aimed at ...
A Wrinkle in Time Movie Review
Originally published in 1962, L'Engle's tale of sci-fi adventure aimed at young readers has become a book beloved by many. Now, the story comes to life in DuVernay's adaptation. A Wrinkle in Time offers an engaging family-friendly sci-fi adventure, but falls short of reaching the potential of its talented cast and director.
'A Wrinkle in Time' review: Ava DuVernay fantasy is a stunner
A Wrinkle in Time is for all the girls - and boys, and non-binary kids, and teens and adults and the elderly - who've ever been a Meg. It's a flawed film that entreats us to love flawed things ...
A Wrinkle in Time
Maybe he couldn't. The NASA scientist was working on something big—exploring the concept of the tesseract, a so-called "wrinkle in time" where space folds in on itself, allowing rapid transit between stars, constellations, maybe whole galaxies. Perhaps Mr. Murry found a way to make the tesseract work.
A Wrinkle in Time (2004) Movie Review
The importance of family. The importance of being. Meg thinks for herself. She learns to be appreciat. Some verbal bullying. A tween girl is made fun of. Parents need to know that this version of A Wrinkle in Time is a TV movie from the early 2000s. Like the 2018 movie, it's based on Madeleine L'Engle's classic sci-fi novel.
Parent reviews for A Wrinkle in Time
6. It. In the book, the It is in a room on a dais and is a telepathic brain. In the movie, It, is a large expansive brain (so big it seems like a weird planet) the kids walk on. It just didn't seem gross or creepy like the book. 7. The climactic scene isn't close to what happens in the book.
A Wrinkle in Time Movie Review for Parents
The most recent home video release of A Wrinkle in Time movie is June 5, 2018. Here are some details… Home Video Notes: A Wrinkle in Time Release Date: 4 June 2018 A Wrinkle in Time releases to home video (Blu-ray/DVD/Digital Copy) with the following bonus features: - A Journey Through Time - Take an up-close look at the making of this ...
A Wrinkle In Time: The Most Brutal Reviews
The movie currently sports a 42% rating over on Rotten Tomatoes based on 78 reviews, indicating a mixed to negative reaction overall. But when big-budget adaptations of beloved novels fall this far short of expectations, hard truths need to be faced. Buckle up for a bevy of attacks on poor CGI, glaring plot holes, and missed themes from the ...
A WRINKLE IN TIME (2018)
A WRINKLE IN TIME is based on a beloved book by Madeline L'Engle, but veers far away from the book's original Christian allegory and presents New Age messages and a plotline that will leave viewers confused. Meg Murry and her father are very close. For years, her father, Dr. Alex Murry, has been trying to find the way to travel to outer ...
A Wrinkle in Time Book Review
Meg i. The book has suspense and a few scary moments. The. Mild flirtation and a kiss. Parents need to know that A Wrinkle in Time is one of the great works of literature for kids. Besides being an exciting story, its messages of individuality, nonconformity, friendship and courage have inspired generations of readers.
'Wrinkle in Time' Movie Reviews: Critics Call It a Disappointing Mess
"A Wrinkle in Time" is a new big-budget Disney movie based on the classic 1962 novel by Madeleine L'Engle. Though critics had high hopes for Ava DuVernay's $100 million budgeted film, the first ...

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A Wrinkle in Time is a sincere, inspiring blockbuster for tweens. Why doesn’t it trust them?

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What’s in A Wrinkle in Time mostly matches the novel. But a lot was left out.

The nature of IT has shifted in this movie, defanging one of Wrinkle ’s most salient insights

A Wrinkle in Time isn’t afraid of spiritual content, but its handling of that material seems indicative of what it believes about its audience

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