The Kidnappers

1904: two Scottish orphans are sent to live with their sternly Calvinist grandfather in Nova Scotia. Starved of affection, forbidden a pet dog, they appropriate a neighbour's baby and after gravely debating whether to name it Rover, they look after it most tenderly. After a flurry of melodrama, it all ends well. This children's classic (Neil Paterson adapting his own novella) is rather too self-consciously heart-warming, and it's hard to read the setting as Nova Scotia when the look is so Pinewood-esque. But cutting through all the artifice, fat-faced, five-year-old Vincent Winter seems pricelessly, artlessly unaffected.