Starring: Abigail Breslin, Jodie Foster, Gerard Butler
Directors: Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin
Category: I
Abigail Breslin may be the headline act in Nim's Island, but Mark Levin's film - an adaptation of a novel by Wendy Orr - will probably be remembered for another thing altogether: Jodie Foster's first attempt at buffoonery on screen.
Rather than a pleasant diversion for both actress and audience, it's a distracting turn, a performance which undermines rather than elevates a mediocre family movie.
The film begins well, with intentional parallels drawn between Nim (Breslin), a young girl leading a reclusive life with her plankton-probing scientist father (Gerard Butler) on a remote island in the south Pacific, and Alexandra Rover (Foster, right), a neurotic, agoraphobic San Franciscan writer who never steps outside her front door, despite being the creator of a series of best-selling children's books based on the adventures of a globe-trotting adventurer called Alex Rover.