August Rush

This inspirational drama gets three stars for oddity value alone. A celestial trumpet for the need to follow your star so old-fashioned it’s postmodern, the latest feature from Jim Sheridan’s daughter stars doe-eyed Freddie Highmore (‘Finding Neverland’) as a 12-year-old, orphaned musical prodigy searching for his parents in a New York populated by characters straight out of ‘Oliver Twist’. Certain that his parents are alive, little Evan Taylor escapes his upstate orphanage, determined to compose a piece in the Big Apple knowing that – to adapt ‘Field of Dreams’ – if they (his parents, played by Keri Russell and Jonathan Rhys Meyers) hear it, they will come. Wisely, Sheridan nurtures a commendable, sobering Lasse Hallström-lite realism in the acting – only letting Robin Williams hang himself as the modern Fagin figure. Most impressive, however, is how Sheridan has modelled such a highly sophisticated cinematic correlative to the script’s twin themes of synchronicity and music. It provides a genuine aesthetic climax unaffected by the sentimentality of the film’s fundamentally fake, born-again philosophy.