Reviewer's grade: A

Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) is a young boy living in 1982 England under the thumb of a fundamentalist religious group known as the Brethren. By chance he meets his school's resident hell-raiser Lee Carter, who is living under his own set of repressive life circumstances.

Lee is making a short film with his older brother Lawrence's (Ed Westwick, "Children of Men") video camera, and enlists Will to be the stuntman. Together the two fatherless boys evolve the story of the Son of Rambow, who must save his father from the clutches of an evil scarecrow. Things are dangerous but fun until French exchange student Didier (Jules Sitruk) and his gang of cronies decide they want to be immortalized on VHS and take over the production, which drives a wedge between Will and Lee.

Essentially a childhood's-end story, "Son of Rambow" also draws some scathing parallels between religious conformity and the blind-faith hipness symptomatic of mass culture's influence on youth.  PG-13

"? Mike Robertson

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