Skills on Toast!

Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) is a sheltered child. Mourning his deceased father, he's been raised by a humble Christian community in which his mother (Jessica Stevenson) finds solace The group shuns all TV and film and Will's only way to express his creativity is through his drawings. Will is bullied by and eventually ends up friends with the school hellion Lee Carter, a thief and scoundrel but a lovable one at that.

Through Lee he's exposed to a pirated copy of Rambo: First Blood and this instantly opens his eyes to the possibilities of adventure. Will and Lee end up collaborating on their own home movie, Son of Rambow which soon involves the whole school, including the idolised, cooler-than-thou French exchange student Didier (Jules Sitruk).

There's a suitable amount of not only 80s but childhood nostalgia; everything from rolling down hills, grazed knees and Space Dust Candy to Carter's exclamations of “skills on toast” (a phrase that I'm considering campaigning to be brought back).

The magic of this film reminds you of the best parts of your childhood. When I was a kid, I saw Indiana Jones and spent a good few weekends trying to make a whip out of some old rope and miserably failing to swing from the apple tree in my garden. Son of Rambow captures this sense of adventure and possibility perfectly – it reminds you about what's possible in childhood; that imagination and the creativity that is not yet constrained by the realities of plausibility, good storytelling or realism. The key here is to have fun and it always looks better in your head than it does on screen but yet this doesn't matter.

Will wants to be a dutiful son and live up to his upbringing of piety, reservation and humility, but as a 10 year old boy, he's desperately searching for an outlet for his imagination. Carter on the other hand is struggling with parental absence. He lives with his older brother who he waits on hand and foot and idolises despite how ungrateful and plain mean he is.