Strayed

A picture-book French film that's pretty and trite, rather than edgy and moving.

Has the strange clarity of a fable.

Ulliel is brilliant as a lost boy who has grown mad in a world filled with madness. And Beart's portrayal is haunting.

A beautifully balanced portrait of a family that is tested and irrevocably altered by a devastating World War II experience.

A fascinating mystery -- a halcyon idyll with a gnawing sense of terror at the edge.

However prosaic the conclusion seems, the film's vision of wide-open space-both physical and mental-cannot be extinguished.

Andre Techine, maestro of the French New Wave directors, tells a seductively simple story of survival set on the outskirts of German occupied Paris in June of 1940.

Strayed proves to be as lost and elusive as its fugitive characters.

Reminiscent of such desert island classics as Swept Away and Lord of the Flies, this film is at heart, a microscopic suspense drama quite independent of the war which brought its unfortunate characters together.