For whatever reason, the moral difficulty of raising children is rarely examined with any semblance of literary seriousness on film. Instead, this divisive but highly accessible theme is regularly reduced to being good fodder for bad comedies. That may be good news...

Finally, my hero has returned. I've been waiting for him for a while now. I was beginning to despair of fantasizing like a teenager. Ever since the last James Bond, since Russel Crowe (Gladiator), and since Rocco the porn star, I've been anticipating my new hero as...

Films like "Dear Frankie" resemble good short stories. The investment of an hour or two reaps the reward of a rich and satisfying, if brief, visit into lives both like and unlike our own. The story told in "Dear Frankie" is sweet and heartbreaking and quietly told, an...

Sometimes, as a break from the shoot-’em-up ear-splitting of mainstream Hollywood, you just need to watch a sweet, loving film about a mother who tricks her deaf son into thinking a perfect stranger is his father. And no, that wasn’t meant to be sarcastic. Despite the...

Four stars. This seems to be the month for enchanting little films from across the pond. Danny Boyle's "Millions" opened locally last week, and today it's followed by director/cinematographer Shona Auerbach's achingly poignant "Dear Frankie," a film as grounded in...

Directed by Shona Auerbach. Starring Emily Mortimer, Jack McElhone and Gerard Butler. Rating: 8 out of 10 First-time director Shona Auerbach understands what some directors never learn: that the space between words is as important as the words themselves. We see that...

Frankie, the 9-year-old boy at the center of the sweet, enormously touching Scottish film "Dear Frankie," is deaf, mute and always the new kid in town. His mother, Lizzie (Emily Mortimer), has been uprooting him every few months since he was little, moving from city...

"Dear Frankie" is sickeningly cruel or tenderly sweet. Sometimes it's one or the other; sometimes it's both at the same time. Perhaps the same statements are true of parenthood. The jarring, yet sentimental Cockney drama from first-time feature director Shona Auerbach...

It must be something in the water. Something that counteracts potential saccharine overload and transforms potentially syrupy scripts into winsome cinematic tales. Or maybe it's the brisk British weather. Whatever the reason, "Dear Frankie" emerges as the second...

Satisfying and even gratifying, Dear Frankie is loaded with traps. Magically, it escapes almost all of them. First, the characters: There's a fatherless, hearing-impaired 9-year-old boy, Frankie, who longs for a dear ol' dad. There's a devoted but discouraged mother,...

Leave it to Britain -- in this case Scotland -- to give us another unassumingly wonderful film about a family trying to make the best of things. In the case of "Dear Frankie," directed by Shona Auerbach and written by Andrea Gibb, it's a story about a deaf boy and his...

3/4 stars There's a cool, gray overlay to Dear Frankie that effectively neutralizes any impulse to extract gratuitous tears. Certainly, the premise of Andrea Gibb's script all but begs for the usual "It Will Touch Your Heart" blurbs. An intelligent, hearing-impaired...

In a seen-it-all world of cinema, the Scottish film Dear Frankie stands out as a fresh, original way to explore the human condition. While the film is remarkable for its subtle, finely honed performances, it is screenwriter Andrea Gibb's story that first jumps out. A...

Scottish drama avoids the usual pitfalls for heart-tuggers about kids When you hear the plot of "Dear Frankie," you may briefly feel a wave of cynicism roll over you. But the movie has been shot with love and wisdom, and its implausible premise doesn't get in the way...

Since you may only have a week or so to catch it, you might consider prioritizing a warm, humane Scottish movie called "Dear Frankie." There isn't any hype. You won't see anyone huckstering the film on Letterman, Oprah or Leno. "Dear Frankie" engenders word of mouth...