gavin6942 Adaption of the famous Oscar Wilde tale about a young American girl (Neve Campbell) that helps a British ghost (Patrick Stewart) find rest and forgiveness.What fool cast Neve Campbell alongside Patrick Stewart? Stewart, despite being best known for his role on "Star Trek", is a great actor with a love of Shakespeare and the classics. Campbell is a disposable actress who has no range of emotion and is doomed to appear in countless sequels to "Scream".The story is good, the effects are good... the dad is more than adequately made out to be a jerk (almost too much, really... being a physicist does not mean you need to be a heartless father with no sense of imagination). I suppose this could have been worse.

didi-5 Neve Campbell and her family (small brothers, sympathetic mum, physicist and cynic father) travel from America to England when he lands a lucrative research post, and almost immediately strange things begin to happen in the de Canterville ancestry home.Bumps and moans in the night, bloodstains, invisible hands on the shoulder - yes, there's a ghost about.Oscar Wilde's story takes shape beautifully in this TV version, one of the numerous adaptations of his tale for children. Patrick Stewart is the ghostly Simon de Canterville, doomed to walk the house at night for all eternity for his earthly crimes, and he is watchable, especially wrestling with the pride of 400 years dead and no one to bow and scrape around him.This being a fairy tale there's romance for Ginny as well in the shape of a local Duke (Daniel Betts) who is sympathetic to ghosts and very charming, as local Dukes so often are in these stories. Donald Sinden and Joan Sims play butler and housekeeper, shielding guilty secrets, and Leslie Philips appears briefly as the current representative of family de Canterville.Recommended for children and adults alike, 'The Canterville Ghost' is charming, touching, and with just the right amount of suspense. The Americans may be paint-by-numbers stereotypes, but that doesn't matter. Without Stewart, I might have rated this much lower, but it definitely deserves high points for his performance alone.

ozthegreatat42330 Despite what some people have said about this TV movie, it was my impression that it was simply magnificent. Patrick Stewart is in his Element in Shakespearean characterization and this is among his finest roles. Neve Campbell brought a warm sensitivity to the role of Virginia and gave a moving performance. The script was first rate, and contrary to what some have said, playing this story in a modern setting works remarkably. That is one of the strengths of great literature that it can be shaped to different times. I was riveted to this production, I having forty years or more since I saw the Charles Laughton version. I can highly recommend this version as a great film and a great family film.

Peter Gruendler as yet. She is congenially to Patrick Steward in this made-for-TV movie, which might have had a good chance on the big screen too.As in so many hollywood movies the film would have been better off without the last sequence.