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Second-hand lions - Tim McCanlies, Haley Joel Osment, Michael Caine, Robert Duvall

Threat advisory: Elevated - Significant risk of entertaining activities

Movie propaganda

The McCann brothers have finally met their match.

For 14-year-old Walter (Haley Joel Osment), his great uncles' farm in rural Texas is the last place on earth he wants to spend the summer. Dumped off by his mother, Mae (Kyra Sedgwick), in the middle of nowhere with two crazy old men and the promise that she'll come back for him, Walter doesn't know what to believe in.

Eccentric and gruff, Hub and Garth McCann (Robert Duvall and Michael Caine) are rumoured to have been bank robbers, mafia hit-men and/or war criminals in their younger days. The truth is elusive, although they do seem to have an endless supply of cash. But Walter begins to see a new side to his great uncles when he stumbles on an old photograph of a beautiful woman hidden away in a trunk and asks Garth who she is.

Little by little, through stories spun against the backdrop of the dusty Texas night, an amazing story comes to life via Walter's vivid, colourful imaginings - a tale set in a long-ago exotic, mysterious place where men rode stallions and fought with swords; where beautiful princesses tangled with treacherous sheikhs; and where the two unlikely heroes lived an adventure most people only dream of.

Whether true or not, the uncles' tales become a doorway to a staggering new world for the boy to live out their adventures. They also give Walter something true to believe in - a world where honour and valour mean more than money and power, and a place that, real or not, belongs only to him. Likewise, in telling their stories to their nephew, Hub and Garth begin to see their own lives with new eyes.

Over one unpredictable Central Texas summer in the early 1960s, everything in the lives of this new family of strangers is about to change forever.