Radio Flyer

'History is all in the mind of the teller; the truth is in the telling' - so Tom Hanks instructs his young son by way of a preamble to this fanciful coming-of-age tale, which failed to find a theatrical distributor in Britain after bombing in the States. You can see why the script attracted big bucks: it has an accentuated literary air that must have read like 'class', a serious angle - child abuse - and it's all couched in the magic juvenilia of a Spielberg (Donner directed Goonies). It's the story of two brothers, their mother (Bracco), and the violent alcoholic who becomes their stepfather (Adam Baldwin in a pitiless role, photographed Spielberg-style from the waist down). It's not a total loss, but the voice-over is infuriatingly overdone, as if the film-makers didn't trust the visuals, the kids are resistible and the tone's discomfortingly cute.