A Hollywood retread of a much better French film, Le grand chemin. A 10-year-old boy (Elijah Wood) is shunted off by his heavily pregnant mother (whose husband may have deserted her) to stay for the summer with friends in the country. The friends (Melanie Griffith, Don Johnson) have problems of their own: they're hardly on speaking, let alone touching terms since the death of their three-year-old son in an accident four years before. At first, the boy spends much of his time up trees with his nine-year-old neighbour (Thora Birch). But then Ben (Johnson) take an interest and takes the boy shrimp fishing: the prelude to a summer both idyllic and traumatic. Writer-director Mary Agnes Donoghue also penned Beaches, but her detached treatment of this story makes it hard to care about any of the people, and the narrative, despite its emotive elements, proves dull and boring. Birch is appealing as the girl, but Wood, now the star of the Lord of the Rings films, lacks warmth in the central role.

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