PREMIERE.COM REVIEW (posted 7/14/03)

Based on the beloved novel by Dodie Smith, author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians, I Capture the Castle tells of a girl named Cassandra, the rational daughter in a family of nutty eccentrics who live in a run-down castle. There she dreams of storybook romance and learns that life doesn't always provide fairy-tale endings. In the book, Cassandra's free-spirited stepmother makes a habit of dancing naked in the rain, but readers don't get much description of the offending behavior. In the movie, just one fleeting glimpse of her "indecent" ritual is enough to earn the whole thing an R rating.

With any luck, parents will disregard the MPAA's outlandish restriction and take their children anyway. There's absolutely nothing else to object to in this charming tale about the bittersweet awakening of first love. As Cassandra, Romola Garai makes a winning, yet vulnerable, young heroine. Henry Thomas and Marc Blucas don't fare nearly as well as the Cotton brothers, ill-suited for the part of two wealthy bachelors who stir up a Jane Austen-worthy game of musical chairs when they arrive in Suffolk to claim the land on which the castle stands. As in Austen, matrimony seems everyone's ultimate goal (especially for Cassandra's older sister (Rose Byrne), who is desperate to marry into money, whether she loves her husband or not), but unlike, say, Sense and Sensibility, Castle is shrewd enough to acknowledge that none of its lovers are guaranteed to live "happily ever after."

That modicum of unpredictability becomes the defining characteristic of Castle, setting it apart from a million movies just like it. Cupid may be at work here—for once love strikes, it never wavers—but his matchmaking skills leave something to be desired, and although the numbers are matched on both sides of the gender divide, some of these suitors are destined to remain single. Which is perfectly fair, if not exactly the norm in stories of this nature. What isn't fair is the film's R rating, which makes this charming coming-of-age tale virtually inaccessible to the audience sure to cherish it most.

— Peter Debruge