BoyActors - Reviews/Ratings by Saga

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Reviews by Saga

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1836 reviews/ratings - 92 pages (20 reviews/ratings per page)

The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe (1988)

Much lower production values than the 2005 film but much more faithful to the book -- has more elbow-room than a feature film. The Narnia books, being straightforwardly plotted and told in a fairly simple prose style, are not badly suited to screen adaptations. This one's mixture of bad animal costumes, real trained dogs for the wolves and animated mythical creatures is kooky but charming. Peter's duel with the wolf is overdramatised and looks too much fun -- it's not the confused and rather horrible brief moment of desperate courage that Lewis, who fought in the First World War as a teenager, effectively conveyed in the book. The battle after Aslan's resurrection looks quite lackadaisical. However, the White Witch's palace scenes are nice and chilling, despite the flimsy scenery (which Barbara Kellerman as Jadis has a great time chewing!) and Edmund's struggle with his conscience is well dramatised. In an interview done when they were adults, all four former child actors said making this show had been a positive experience for them.

My Movie Rating:

9 / 10

Little Annie Rooney (1925)

Superbly crafted. Joe Butterworth, an actual Irish immigrant, is striking in his smallish role as Mickey Kelly. The grown-up Mary Pickford plays a little girl. Common thing to do at the time. Harry Langdon played a lad in his later teens in the 1927 dark comedy Long Pants; Olive Thomas played a sixteen-year-old girl in the delightful 1920 The Flapper; Mabel Normand of the excellent comedies The Extra Girl, A Dash Through the Clouds and The Water Nymph played a child in Tomboy Bessie. Lillian Gish, in the same year as her starring role in D. W. Griffith's fine pastoral True Heart Susie, did it in Griffith's superb Broken Blossoms, though they did bump up her character's age from twelve, in the original Thomas Burke short story from Limehouse Nights, to fifteen. Pickford, stretching things further, played a child of ten and eleven in Maurice Tourneur's innovative The Poor Little Rich Girl in 1917, and the public ate it up, and she kept at it.

My Movie Rating:

10 / 10

Little Boy Lost (1953)

My Movie Rating:

8 / 10

Little Criminals (1995)

My Movie Rating:

8 / 10

Little Fugitive (1953)

One of the first films to portray children with realism. The other two films Morris Engel made are Lovers and Lollipops, in which a seven-year-old girl is shown just as realistically, and Weddings and Babies.

My Movie Rating:

10 / 10

Little Fugitive (2006)

The lads act well but this remake, apart from being unnecessary -- why tamper with perfection? --, is full of sappy lines, superfluous exposition and silly extra plot elements.

My Movie Rating:

3 / 10

Little Giants (1994)

Fair to middling.

My Movie Rating:

5 / 10

Little House on the Prairie (1974-1983)

My Movie Rating:

8 / 10

Little Lord Fauntleroy (1980)

Great performance by Ricky Schroder, here all velvet, lace and long blond locks, just as Frances Hodgson Burnett intended. The massively popular book spawned, among other things, a line in boys' clothing -- "No one", says E. Nesbit, "can fully taste of the joys of life if he is in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit."

My Movie Rating:

9 / 10

Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936)

A class act with a knockout turn from Freddie Bartholomew. His acting is enthralling. The film is at some pains to show our hero as a boyish boy, to counteract his sissified reputation.

My Movie Rating:

9 / 10

Little Lord Fauntleroy (1995)

It's hard to create a truly satisfying screen Little Lord Fauntleroy just because Ceddie is such a distillation of every conceivable good quality that the boy playing him has a very difficult job on his hands. But though he's no Freddie Bartholomew, the English-American boy Michael Benz carries this straightforward, solid series very creditably, despite being a bit old for the part -- Ced is seven, though they've bumped his age up to eleven here -- and handicapped by what sure looks like a wig (or is it just a lot of hairspray?). As an adult he's acted in some Shakespeares at the reconstructed Globe. This series expands a fair bit on the events of the novel but manages to do so in a real Burnettian-cum-Dickensian spirit.

My Movie Rating:

9 / 10

Little Man Tate (1991)

My Movie Rating:

7 / 10

Little Manhattan (2005)

Josh Hutcherson's performance, which requires a lot of him, is superb. This neatly-made piece may well be the only film he appeared in as a child which was worthy of his acting talent. It requires some suspension of disbelief: the main character's narration is sometimes overly adult, and even without that, these would be more plausible as the first-love feelings of someone a few years older than ten -- indeed, the director was sixteen during the events that partly inspired the script. Nonetheless, the film is a remarkably, sometimes painfully, accurate depiction of what it's like to be in love. There's nothing quite like it in cinema, and its truthfulness puts it up there with the best, most honest films ever made about romantic love: A Swedish Love Story, Un Amour de jeunesse, Brief Encounter, Der blaue Engel, July Rain, the 1932 version of Back Street.

My Movie Rating:

9 / 10

Little Men (1934)

My Movie Rating:

8 / 10

Little Men (2016)

Bright and naturalistic piece by Ira Sachs, who directed the very good gay-themed films Love Is Strange and Keep the Lights On. Excellent acting from both boys.

My Movie Rating:

9 / 10

Little Men (1940)

My Movie Rating:

8 / 10

The Little Rascals (1994)

Cynical schlock featuring four-year-olds saying lines meant to make them sound like venial adults. Something in a bit in this line with more heart and charm is La ultima batalla.

My Movie Rating:

3 / 10

The Little Rascals (1955)

Pretty good!

My Movie Rating:

7 / 10

The Little Red Schoolhouse (1936)

My Movie Rating:

7 / 10

Little Shit (2018)

My Movie Rating:

9 / 10

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