The perils of street life, bullying classmates, and a dispassionate single-mom (Angela Bassett) add to Akeelah’s frustrations. Spear-headed by an impertinent performance by Keke Palmer as the 11-year-old Akeelah Anderson, this is the story of a spelling whiz prodigy, hailing from the low-income neighborhood of LA.
#Movie about child piano prodigy movie#
Doug Atchison’s Akeelah and the Bee is a more formulaic yet very entertaining movie version on the pre-teen spelling bees. The 2002 documentary Spellbound (by Jeffrey Blitz) grippingly followed eight precocious kids preparing to enter the 1999 National Spelling Bee Championship. Related to Child Prodigy Movies – Beats Netflix Review: A Decent Film about an Underdog-Prodigy 9. Overall, the film is compelling due to the scene-stealing performance of McKenna and understated performance from ‘Captain America’ Evans.
It also duly utters the central message of why children’s intellectual pursuits can’t be strictly defined by adults’ obsessions. ‘Gifted’ ticks off all the familiar sentimental boxes as it pits a sympathetic child against an evil matriarch. But the child prodigy’s very intelligence attracts the attention of the wealthy maternal grandmother, Evelyn (Lindsay Duncan). She displays a few of her extraordinary math skills to startle her homeroom teacher Bonnie (Jenny Slate). Of course, Mary stands out in her elementary classroom. Worrying that the home-schooled Mary won’t have any friends or real-world experience, Frank enrolls his niece in a local school. Frank tries his best to raise the kid as her late-sister would have wanted to, and his caring neighbor (Octavia Spencer) also chips in. She plays the spirited 7-year-old Mary, raised by her uncle/guardian Frank Adler (Chris Evans) in the calm neighborhood of Florida. The undeniably cute and ‘smart-ass’ child-star McKenna Grace is gifted in Marc Webb’s tear-jerking custody battle drama. Yet the performances keep it grounded and appealing. Murer deals with the familiar ‘gift-can-be-nurse’ story-line, but Vitus mostly suffers from sloppy turns in the final act.
Vitus can truly be himself only with his grandfather (a bewitching performance by the great Bruno Ganz). Dad is an inventor who is too preoccupied with his business. Vitus’ English mother (Julika Jenkins) wants him to be a concert pianist. Murer’s light-hearted and leisurely paced Swiss drama tells the eponymous tale of a 12-year-old piano prodigy (Teo Gheorghiu) who has an IQ of 180. The films mentioned below grapple with such problems or quandary (of kids & teens), some with unflinching profundity and some hide its relevant messages beneath saccharine narrative layers.įredi M. Movies like A Beautiful Mind (2001), Shine (1996), Good Will Hunting (1997), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The End of the Tour (2015), The Man Who Knew Infinity (2016) dealt with super-smart people burdened with mental or emotional problems.
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In fact, Robinson was just seven years old when he appeared in “No Leave, No Love.Gifted children (or prodigy) movies are driven by an intriguing paradox: what if they don’t realize their full potential if not adequately challenged? But what if the pursuit of intense challenges inculcates within them a fear of failure which can adversely impact their childhood and beyond? In a world where individuals can be casually stigmatized for being ‘different’, extraordinary intellect can’t always be a gift. Naturally, he was in great demand to record and perform. The story goes ‘Sugar Chile’, who was the youngest of the seven children, would climb up onto the piano bench and taught himself to play what he heard on the radio.Īt just three years old he won an under-18 talent contest - you can imagine everyone’s eyes popping out of their head when a toddler sat down at the piano and began to sing and play the blues. Neither of his parents were musical but the family of nine did own a piano that had been left at the house by an aunt. This video is an excerpt from the 1946 post-war film “No Leave, No Love,” starring Van Johnson, Keenan Wynn, and Pat Kirkwood, and the piano-playing wunderkind featured in the movie is Frank “Sugar Chile” Robinson:įrank was tiny when he showed unusual gifts for singing the blues and playing the piano. Although Richard Penniman was undeniably musically talented as a youngster, he is not the child seen in this clip.