The English film Boy A, one of the strongest dramatic features in this year's Tribeca Film Festival, is a sympathetic character study of a person that most of society would vote to flush: a twenty-four-year-old man (Andrew Garfield) who's just been released from prison after serving a fourteen-year sentence for a murder committed when he was ten years old. The movie, which is based on a novel by Jonathan Trigell, was directed by John Crowley from a script by Mark O'Rowe. They previously worked together on the Intermission, an invigorating jumble of a movie with a slew of characters colliding with each others as their storylines criss-crossed. Boy A has a smaller cast and a much tighter focus: everything comes down to the character who, during his trial, was turned by the tabloids into a monster known by the protective alias "Boy A." Preparing him for release into the world, his gently paternal counselor (Peter Mullen) christens him "Jack" and advises him to immediately start applying for as many jobs as he can, because "the more forms you fill out, the more real your name's going to become to you."
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