Oliver Twist with a dash of Beethoven. This movie is incredibly sweet – a love story about music and the connections we make to people and the universe through it.

Freddie Highmore is absolutely brilliant! Although with his recent success, I reflect briefly on the problems that child actors find in their futures: Bobby Driscoll (child Disney star/voice of Peter Pan overdosed on drugs), Macaulay Culkin seems to have adjusted but what has he done since Saved!, and where is Haley Joel Osmont?

The music is absolutely gorgeous…brilliant combinations of classical and rock inflections. AND! Keri Russel (mother), Jonathon Rhys Mayer (father) and Freddie Highmore (prodigal son) all play their own instruments (the credits list their tutors and they are credited on the soundtrack). It makes me so happy to see a movie that is so much about the music is organically created/represented by the actors…(clarification – the tutors taught them how to look like they were playing the music perfectly – Freddie Highmore and Keri Russel are not listed on the soundtrack and Johnathan Rhys Mayer is only credited on songs that he sings…but I was still very much impressed with their performances).

AND! It was filmed in New York/New Jersey instead of in Canada.

Also features an excellent performance by Robin Williams in the role of Fagin/Bill Sykes who takes Evan (Highmore) in, gives him the musical name August Rush and teaches him everything he knows about music.

The one thing I will complain about the movie is the ending.  I wanted a hug because the dialogue for the ending just seems too cheesy…(the music is all around us…all you have to do is listen).  I think it particularly bothered me because Disney practically says the same thing (the magic is all around us…all you have to do is believe)…but the movie was incredible enough that I can overlook it.   And maybe a hug is too cheesy for the rest of the world…I don’t know.

Wonderfully, powerful, enjoyable romantic drama about a couple torn about by the lie of the younger sister who struggles with her sin for the rest of her life. Set in the mid-late 1930′s in England, the film stars a plethora of talented actors and actresses from previous Focus Feature films as well as Kiera Knightley and James McAvoy as the young couple. Cecilia (Knightly) is the daughter of a wealthy woman and Robbie (McAvoy) is the hired hand’s son who went to Cambridge with her, where she avoided him because of his stature. But one night, they can avoid each other no longer, and are caught in an awkward position in the library by Cecilia’s younger sister Briony. When a ghastly crime is committed, young Briony (as children do) latches on to the idea that Robbie did it, leading to Robbie’s arrest and later conscription into World War 2, his societal atonement for a crime he never committed. Once Briony realizes her mistake, she desperately tries to make atonement for her sin…

One of the most incredible things about the film (aside from all the lovely period costumes and set design) is the masterful 10 minute (roughly) “one-take shot” at sunset on the beaches of Dunkirk where the camera follows Robbie and his friends as they explore the chaos of the restless Allied soldiers waiting to be rescued. It almost makes you antsy how the shot just keeps going and going, but it’s so beautifully orchestrated and incredibly raw that you can’t look away. It’s glorious!

The other incredible thing that stil sticks with me is one of the staged camera shots.  After Robbie shows up before he is arrested, the family/friends/police are all standing in front of the mansion and the camera either zoomed in on them or held on them for several seconds and just the way that everyone was positioned, the way the shot was composed was just so powerful….like a piece of art….gorgeous…

Gory things to watch out for: murdered school children in France, horses being shot on the beaches of Dunkirk and open head wounds (brains! yum!).