A Boy Called Dad (15)

This drama of reluctant fatherhood is basically a two-hander between a 14-year-old tearaway (Kyle Ward) and his feckless gambler of a dad (Ian Hart), who re-enters his life almost by accident.

It's a film of two halves, the first set in the drearier reaches of the Wirral peninsula, the second in an unspecified pastoral landscape where the teenage boy goes on the run. Hart and Ward impress as the warring father and son, but Julie Rutterford's screenplay, sincere though it is, doesn't work hard enough to find alternatives to the cliched.