One of my favorite Sundance Film Festival movies has gotten a name change and a May 31 release date, and you should see it for a lot of reasons, the primary one being 18-year-old Moises Arias' breakout performance. He's the kid dancing on the pipe in this teaser trailer for The Kings of Summer — previously Toy's House — and he had me and a lot of other audience members laughing out loud at the Park City screening I saw in January.
Arias plays Biaggio, one of three kids who escape their homes and frustrating families for a makeshift house they build from scavenged materials in a secluded forest in their hometown. He's not the star of Jordan Vogt-Roberts coming-of-age comedy — he's actually the extremely odd classmate who invites himself along for the adventure — but he gets a lot of the best laughs. That has a lot to do with Arias'memorable face and his deer-in-the-headlights stare, which he uses to great advantage.
I hope we're going to be seeing a lot more of this kid, who's also playing Bonzo in one of the fall's hotly anticipated films, Gavin Hood's adaptation of Orson Scott Card's Hugo Award-winning science-fiction novel, Ender's Game.
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