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Gifted

7/10

Stars: Chris Evans, Mckenna Grace, Lindsay Duncan, Octavia Spencer, Michael Kendall Kaplan, Jenny Slate, Glenn Plummer

Director: Marc Webb

A tug-of-love weepie about a seven-year-old girl, Mary (Grace) who is a mathematical genius along the lines of the real-life figure recently played by Taraji P Henson in Hidden Figures.

Strangely, Octavia Spencer is in both films, here as the down-to-earth neighbour of the girl's uncle, Frank (Evans), a boat engineer/repair man, who has looked after her since she was six months old, and has been aiming to give her as normal a life as possible, following the suicide of her mother, herself one of the finest maths brains in Americas,

Then the girl's grandmother (Duncan, here looking like a dead ringer for Hollywood's Patricia Clarkson) appears on the scene and a courtroom custody battle ensues.

To our eyes, it looks rather strange when the girl is offloaded on to foster parents towards the end (admittedly with her one-eyed ginger cat in tow), but if she weren't, we wouldn't have an emotive ending. Doesn't, though, excuse the conceit.

Evans (in a nice change of pace from his Captain America role), Spencer and Duncan are all good, but the kid is truly excellent and upstages everyone - even the cat.

David Quinlan

USA 2017. UK Distributor: 20th Century Fox (Fox Searchlight). Colour by Arri.
99 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 12A.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 0, Violence/Horror 0, Drugs 0, Swearing 1.

Review date: 11 Jun 2017