The Butcher Boy

The comic-strip panels that fill the screen during the opening credits set the tone: Neil Jordan's adaptation of Patrick McCabe's award-winning novel is brash, broadly drawn and awash in saturated color. But it's no cartoon. Bubbling just below the hyper-real surface is a wrenching and ultimately horrifying tale of adolescent isolation. It's 1962, and as the Cuban Missile Crisis escalates to a nail-biting climax, a different kind of explosion is set to blow in a small Irish village. Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens) is a precocious 12-year-old hellion whose freckle-faced, manically cheerful exterior masks an ever-deepening emotional disturbance. Francie lives in a fanta...