Every Picture Tells A Story [1984] [DVD]

Director James Scott recalls the troubled adolescence that helped shape his father William's sensibilities in this portrait of the artist as a young man. Scripted by Shane Connaughton, who co-wrote My Left Foot, it begins as an unsentimental study of working-class life in Scotland and Northern Ireland in the early 1920s.

Phyllis Logan is typically assured as William's mother, and the trio playing the growing boy all do well. Once Alex Norton (who plays Scott senior) departs the scene, however, the action starts to falter in this visually impressive but dramatically flawed film.