Little Boy Blue

A tormented teen (Dawson’s Creek‘s Ryan Phillippe) struggles to survive, psychically and physically, in a white-trash Texas home ruled by an ogre (John Savage brings nerve-rattling intensity to the role) and infested with sexual depravity. Given its squalid material, Little Boy Blue might have amounted to little more than a Jerry Springeresque freak show. But scripter Michael Boston and director Antonio Tibaldi have given it the darkest and most mesmerizing qualities of a dream, creating a Brothers Grimm tale that substitutes a hovel on the bleak Southwestern prairie for a lonely hut in the Black Forest. A-