Upside-Down Magic

Nory Boxwood Horace and her best friend Reina Carvajal enroll at the Sage Academy for Magical Studies, where students are sorted according to their talents. Reina, who can control fire, quickly rises to the top of her class, while Nory's shapeshifting proves erratic: instead of a kitten she turns into a mix of cat and dragon. That lands her in a class for pupils whose magic is unstable and unpredictable, a group the school's headmistress regards as unfit to face dangerous dark magic. Nory sets out to show that her kind of magic can be just as strong as anyone else's.

The film is a family fantasy based on a book series and was released in 2020 as a television movie from Disney's branded television division. Joe Nussbaum directed it, the fifth feature in a filmography that runs from Sleepover in 2004 through American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile, Sydney White and Prom. Izabela Rose plays Nory and Siena Agudong plays Reina, with Kyle Howard, Max Torina, Elie Samouhi and Alison Fernandez among the credited cast of twenty-six.

Audience response splits by platform: on IMDb it holds a modest 5.4 from roughly 2,400 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 7.1 from about 275 votes, a much smaller sample giving a considerably warmer reading.