The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2013)

Jeunet's best films have always overflowed with joie de vivre while dicing with whimsicality, and after a four-year hiatus he accordingly produced more of the same, this time in English and based on someone else's source material, but very much stamped through with his idiosyncratic style all the same. In a nutshell, a serious 10-year-old boy genius undertakes a journey from his family ranch in Montana to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington. Hung on this febrile framework are digressions into various sciences, flights of fantasy and altercations with various odd characters (yes, Dominique Pinon gets a shoe-horned cameo again). It's as sweet and imaginative as you'd expect from the director and also well cast, including the child lead who stays just the right side of cloying in his squeaky elaborations. But it has to be said that Jeunet is hardly stretching himself after his latest break: you won't feel or remember much of it the next day, largely because not only he but also Gilliam, Burton and Wes Anderson, to name his closest peers, have all been over this terrain many times before.

6/10