The BFG (Steven Spielberg, 2016)

Roald Dahl's story of a giant who befriends a little girl is a perfect vehicle for Spielberg's perennial message of a child's sense of wonder against the big, bad world. This means that there are naturally times in the film when eons of marvelling at coloured lights to a swooping soundtrack will get too much for an adult, but it has to be said that the visuals in the more down-to-earth sequences are truly captivating and peppered with inventiveness, even allowing for the regulation depiction of England as some kind of 1950s/Victorian cobbled candy store. The choice of Shakespearean heavyweight Mark Rylance as the performance-capture template and voice for the benevolent and gobbledygook-spouting giant may also have seemed wilfully off-centre, but it works perfectly and the actor's screen presence really comes through, which in turn prevents the whole affair from becoming the cloying confection that so many of Spielberg's forays into kids' films have been wont to be.

6/10