August Rush

“Awful! Awful! Really, gutbustingly awful!” - Mark Kermode, BBC Radio 5live

Film that very nearly killed the promising career of Freddie Highmore stone dead. Like Last Days it did not really receive a full review on the programme; only after, during the Box Office Top 10, did Mark Kermode get a chance to vent his fury.

The reason it bothered him so much was that it purported to be a film about the transcendent power of music but it was one in which the people on screen appear to have never played a musical instrument in their lives; when hands go up the keyboard on screen, the sound of notes goes down the keyboard on the soundtrack. Another actor handles a stringed instrument “as if it is a knitting loom.”