This movie felt a little surreal to me. It starts out in a perfect perfect cheesy world, everybody smiley and nothing could possibly go wrong, which is sometimes fine but here gets just a little annoying. Most of the acting is pretty bad and the production design feels too clean and simplistic – Samantha’s Uncle Gard looks frighteningly like he stepped out of Timothy Hines’ The War of the Worlds. If it weren’t for AnnaSophia Robb I would’ve been struggling to keep watching.

Halfway, though, the movie really changes gear, goes a little darker, and by the end I had kind of completely surrendered to it. It’s a good Christmas movie too, something I wasn’t expecting. It’s far from being a great movie, and though I haven’t read any of the American Girl books the adaptation feels way too slapdash, like one of the recent Harry Potter movies, leaping from episode to episode, a little blinding for non-readers; but if you want a little cuteness in your life this Christmas, you can’t go wrong here.