Last Summer

Despite its superficial resemblance to Rob Reiner's Stand By Me (1986), Jon Jones's decent feature bow has more in common with Daniel Patrick Carbone's Hide Your Smiling Faces (2013), as it focuses on the impact of sudden violent death upon a group of tweenage boys. Set in rural Wales in the 1970s, the action is viewed from the perspective of animal-loving ten-year-old Davy Davis (Noa Thomas), whose friends Rhys (Rowan Jones) and Robbie (Christopher Benning), along with their older brother (Steffan Cennydd) are made orphans. Such is the keenness of the juvenile insights that the adults sometimes seem like cyphers, whose sensible suggestions are viewed as monstrous miscalculations designed to prevent things returning to normal. But, while Jones (a small-screen veteran with a raft of impressive credits) coaxes earnest performances from his young cast, his screenplay has a 70s children's telly feel about it, as it keeps raising issues about rural life without exploring them with any depth.