Bird

It says a lot about this dark and beguiling coming-of-age fable that a subplot centered on the attempts of a ne'er-do-well father (Barry Keoghan; Saltburn, The Banshees of Inisherin) to find the right indie pop song to coax hallucinogenic slime from an exotic toad is not its trippiest moment: Some of us, it seems, have indeed entertained angels—or at least mythological shapeshifters—unaware. And sometimes those guardians need a degree of saving, too.

Maybe you could call 12-year-old Bailey (a luminous and fierce Nykiya Adams) and her brother Hunter latchkey kids if their North Kent squat had a door to latch. The brutality and nihilism of the streets feels like an unavoidable vortex until the eccentric outsider Bird (Franz Rogowski; Passages) arrives out of nowhere on a quest to find his father, shifting the story into magical realism territory in which hope itself transforms from myth to tangible reality.