Radio Flyer

Radio Flyer (1992) — watch online this Richard Donner drama starring Elijah Wood and Joseph Mazzello on iFILM. A grown man named Mike tells his children a story about his childhood: after their father left, he and his younger brother Bobby moved to a new town, their mother remarried, and their stepfather turned out to be brutal.

Bobby takes the beatings quietly, in that hollow way children do when they've learned that telling someone won't change anything. Mike is too young to fight back, so he plans something else — to rebuild their old toy wagon, the Radio Flyer, into an actual flying machine and get his brother out. Elijah Wood and Joseph Mazzello make you believe every inch of that plan.

Donner frames child abuse through the logic of childhood imagination, which is both the film's gentlest choice and its most effective one. The ending asks you to decide what you believe. Stream Radio Flyer (1992) online on iFILM.