I'M A SUCKER for daddy movies. I can trace the onset of my hypersensitivity to such films (meaning I get misty-eyed and inarticulate anywhere near stories revolving around the relationship between a father and child, especially a boy) to the birth of my own son 5 1/2...

Dear Frankie is a sweet, life-affirming story of the sort that easily could easily get overlooked. Miramax Pictures, the distributor with an uncertain future, repeatedly rescheduled the movie's opening and seems to be giving it little marketing attention. How...

By all rights, ''Dear Frankie" should be unbearably sentimental bilge. That's certainly how it comes across in the trailers. But this wee Scottish drama takes a mawkish premise and, by playing its cards close to the vest, imbues it with quiet, careworn dignity. The...

3 stars (out of 4) Sometimes we enjoy movies even if we know exactly how they work and exactly how they're going to turn out. Director Shona Auerbach's debut feature "Dear Frankie" appeals to this sensibility, with its engaging, intimate story of a tender deception....

Lizzie Morrison (Emily Mortimer) lives on the run. Accompanied by her mother, Nell (Mary Riggans), and her deaf son, Frankie (Jack McElhone), she flits from one small Scottish town to the next, barely keeping ahead of the abusive ex-husband determined to find her....

Lizzie loves her son Frankie. That is why she is on the run. Shona Auerbach's sweet and thought-provoking little film "Dear Frankie" is the complete and utter anti-thesis to the other two new releases this weekend. Those films, "Be Cool" and "The Jacket," are loud,...

One of four films showcased at this month’s Portland International Film Festival, Dear Frankie had already created quite a buzz at Cannes, where it elicited a 15-minute standing ovation. Showings at the Sedona, AZ and Cleveland, OH Festivals in March will round out...

CRITIC'S CHOICE A young deaf boy, Frankie (Jack McElhone), tracks on a map the peregrinations of the merchant ship on which his mother (Mortimer) has told him his absent father is working. He eagerly pores over the letters that arrive for him from exotic foreign...

Dear Frankie (Shona Auerbach, UK 2004, 104mins) There is a quiet, yet distinct “once upon a time” quality at the heart of Shona Auerbach’s likeable, though uneven, debut feature, which is as much about the relationship of a young, single-mom and her deaf-mute son as...

FRANKIE Morrison, age 9, is deaf and doesn't speak, but he's far from dumb. He's a budding marine biologist growing up in Glasgow who pins a world map to the wall to chart the location of his father, a sailor who writes him regularly and whose ship, the Accra, is...

Dear Frankie, your mom is pulling one over on you. Well, Emily Mortimer has the best intentions when she crafts a ruse for her precocious, deaf son (10-year-old Jack McElhone), telling him that his father is a sailor willing but unable to return home. She even writes...

DEAR FRANKIE. With Emily Mortimer, Gerard Butler, Jack McElhone. Director Shona Auerbach. (1:45) At Angelika, Lincoln Square. PG: Language. It sounds like the scenario for a sitcom: Single mother of deaf kid pays stranger to be father for a day - entanglements ensue....

Lizzie, a single mom desperate for a man in the deeply moving domestic drama "Dear Frankie," anxiously scans the faces of every male at a Glasgow pub. As Lizzie, Emily Mortimer uses her dark, expressive eyes to register dismay at a bland balding patron followed by...

Set in a Scottish port city, 'Dear Frankie' is infused with tender family feeling. "Dear Frankie" stars Emily Mortimer as a single mother who creates a make-believe dad to compensate for the one her 9-year-old son has already got. Lizzie (Mortimer), Frankie (Jack...

CRITIC'S CHOICE DRAMA A young deaf boy, Frankie (Jack McElhone), tracks on a map the peregrinations of the merchant ship on which his mother (Mortimer) has told him his absent father is working. He eagerly pores over the letters that arrive for him from exotic foreign...

THE OPENING MOMENTS of director Shona Auerbach's "Dear Frankie" reflect the love and attention the filmmakers clearly lavished on this wondrous little gem: A boy carefully packs his few treasures up in newspapers and a cardboard box as his family prepares to move. In...

Moving performances almost overcome emotional conceits in tender drama about a boy and his fake father Sometimes no amount of good acting can make a film hold your interest. "Dear Frankie" stars newcomer Jack McElhone as 10-year-old Frankie, a deaf Scottish lad who...

So much of our sense of contemporary Glasgow has come from the films of Ken Loach that one initially reacts to first-time feature director Shona Auerbach and writer Andrea Gibb as interlopers. However, Dear Frankie is neither facsimile of, nor poor cousin to, Loach’s...

Dear Frankie Shona Auerbach's first feature is a Scottish seriocomedy that's bittersweet but perhaps just a little too low-key for its own good. Nine-year-old Frankie (Jake McElhone), his mother, Lizzie (Emily Mortimer), and grandmother Nell (Mary Riggans) are...