Kit Kittredge: An American Girl

Kit Kittredge: An American Girl

Directed by Patricia Rozema (G)

The first feature film based on the popular American Girls books and dolls.

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Kit Kittredge: An American Girl is clean, “resolutely old-fashioned” fun, said Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News. It’s just the film you’d expect from the beloved brand behind the historically themed American Girls books and dolls. In Kit Kittredge, a “charmingly no-nonsense” Abigail Breslin plays an aspiring reporter working to help her family during the Great Depression. The film has the same “earnestly wholesome tone” and meticulous period detail as the books, but comes off “a little stiff and moralistic.” It also can be sickeningly sentimental, said Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.com. But what do you expect from a “G-rated picture based on a doll”? For the most part, director Patricia Rozema and the cast aim for “emotional authenticity” and achieve it. In fact, Kit Kittredge is “amazingly gritty” and honest for a children’s movie, said Lou Lumenick in the New York Post. The script “never talks down” to its young audience about the grim realities of the Depression. That makes Kit Kittredge a valuable “history lesson that speaks across the decades.”