Azazel Jacobs charmed LFF audiences with his previous film Momma's Man, and seems set to do the same with Terri, an affectionate and subtly drawn study of a teenage outsider. Beautifully played by newcomer Jacob Wysocki, Terri is a large, lumbering adolescent who has been left to live with his ailing uncle in a cottage in the woods. His gentle demeanour and outsize physique see him routinely teased and bullied at school, something he deals with by withdrawing and becoming ever more insular. When Mr Fitzgerald (John C Reilly), the school's sincere but embarrassing vice-principal, takes an interest in him, the teacher's efforts to help only compound Terri's outcast status. Fitzgerald's robust but inept encouragements provide much of the film's humour, but they do slowly get through to Terri, who begins to see that life might not have to be quite such a solitary affair. While Terri's story might not sound so different from a host of other high-school misfit movies, Jacobs' approach is highly original and unafraid to surprise us, wise and very funny by turn. Marrying emotional insight with lyrical visuals, he makes Terri's loneliness and sense of difference keenly and compassionately felt.

Sandra Hebron