Ed-Shullivan Warning: This movie should not be seen by anyone under the age of 16All parents and teenagers (16 years or older) should watch this movie in an effort to become more aware of your surroundings and to understand that evil predators exist amongst us. In real life, there remains thousands of parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, who have been left wondering what happened to their tiny angel(s) on that one tragic day that seemed to start out just like any other day, when the child was left unattended for just a few minutes only to go missing forever more. This is a tragedy and mystery that occurs every day across North America and we always think it won't happen to our own family.Stolen Lives is a movie that depicts a series of tragic events that occurred 50 years earlier when a good family man named Matthew Wakefield played by Josh Lucas, who is struggling to find work and keep his three young sons together as a family, makes a critical mistake and leaves one of his sons alone in the car for just a few minutes one evening. When Matthew returns to his car, his son is gone. Frantically he goes to the local sheriff for assistance but due to Matthew Wakefield's impropriety with a married woman on the evening his son went missing, and his son being mentally challenged, the sheriff is not very sympathetic nor interested in determining what happened to this young boy. It is a fact that back in the first half of the last century child abductions were not intelligently nor systematically investigated or documented to assess what we now know was the work and existence of serial killers. The movie smartly flips back and forth between the fifty year span of the two missing boys initial disappearances. Matthew Wakefield is seen searching for his lost son in the 1950's, and then the scene switches to the current period where detective Tom Adkins Sr is seen searching endlessly for clues into the disappearance of his young and innocent son. The movie provides us with comparisons between the two crimes. Mr. Wakefields lost son disappeared while he was left sleeping in their car, and then the director smartly takes us to current events and the scene flips to a period when an off duty detective named Tom Adkins Sr. played superbly by Jon Hamm takes his young son out to the local carnival for the afternoon and while sitting having some lunch in a trailer type diner he leaves his son alone for just 2 minutes so that he can use the diners rest room. When Detecive Adkins returns to his table his son has completely vanished with no clues, no witnesses, and most importantly, no son. The message I absorbed from these two tragic events is that child abductions have been occurring by serial killers who if not yet been arrested and that they will continue with their evil crimes if not caught. The outcome of these two tragic events that span 50 years is that families never recover and typically ones own guilt overpowers all other emotions as these crimes of opportunity could have been easily prevented. We as good parents have a certain level of trust and security in our own communities but unfortunately these two fathers were not attentive parents on just a single occasion. As a result of the fathers letting their guard down on just a single occasion they become victims and it causes a series of events that affect their own lives as well as the lives of their their extended families who also fall into despair, wondering and praying for their young angels to return home. Truth is however, that thousands of innocent children who are abducted are never found.We have recently learned of a few happy endings such as with the two unrelated discoveries of two missing children whose names are Jaycee Dugard and Shawn Hornbeck who were kidnapped and kept in captivity for years before they were eventually found and returned to their families, albeit many years later with their innocence tarnished forever. Stolen Lives is a movie I recommend to all families as long as their age is over 16. Whether you are married, single, have children, plan to have children in the future, or you are a babysitter minding your siblings, or minding a neighbor's children, please watch this movie. It will certainly hone your sense of responsibility and impress upon all of us how easily a brief lapse in judgement, or a misguided level of trust in humanity needs to be balanced with reality and a higher level of protection for our most blessed gift, our children. Serial killers exist more than we are prepared to comprehend and they prey on the weak and unassuming. This is a great movie with a great cast and the director laid out the movie and series of tragic events over 50 years superbly. Lets always keep our guard up and our children safe from these evil predators.

Cold Heart I was flipping through channels late last night when I found Stolen. I must admit I was frozen and watched the whole movie without touching the remote control. I know Josh Lucas from another movie or show that I don't remember, I know Jessica Chastain and a few more from the cast but not a fan enough to watch their movie for the name alone. I don't know the director so the movie held the whole of my attention in the wee hours of the night is a feat I must say.I didn't find Stolen worthy of an Oscar in all reality. The movie doesn't look too ambitious to be an Oscar hopeful. Instead it speaks the language of complex human emotions and very subliminally narrates entwined tragedies of misfortune, of personal behavior and of choices. There's also the presence of thumping, pulsating Love which continues in the face of all tragedies and human errors and it continues in the presence of sheer evil which alters, breaks or destroys each life it touches. The pure joy in my opinion is the fact that we don't get all of this message in the form of a melodramatic speech from one of the characters in the movie rather the movie leaves a narrative from which we decipher it's meaning.Beautiful.I give it 7/10 for thought provoking entertainment and raise it to 8/10 for staying true to it's subject without stretching itself in hope of winning any accolades.

Tss5078 When you watch a lot of independent and direct-to-video films, you see a lot of garbage, but occasionally you find a gem that makes it all worthwhile, Stolen, is one of those gems. This story was so intriguing and well written that I was absolutely blown away. The film is about a detective whose son went missing, without a trace, eight years ago. The trail is cold and he's beginning to accept that he will never find him, when a local construction crew finds a boy in a box. The body has been there for at least fifty years, but the case awakens something in the detective who has to learn the truth. From there, quite ingeniously, the film is divided into three different stories, the story of the boy in the box, the detectives investigation, and the story of his own child. It was seriously like watching three different movies at once, and they were all great! The cast was pretty phenomenal too, as this was a very hard thing to pull off, but they did it seemingly with ease. Josh Lucas just blew my mind, giving an unrivaled performance as the father of the other missing boy. I've seen him in things before, but nothing was as memorable as this. Stolen is a film that consists of three stories in once, that will pull on your emotions and have you on the edge of your seat. It's one of the best films I've seen all year and I can't recommend it enough!

jc-osms This thriller, starring "Mad Men's" John Hamm, while watchable, ultimately fails through implausible plotting and the contrived use of coincidence.Consider Hamm's anguished cop, who, at a Fourth of July pageant, in the mere minutes it took him to go to and from the toilet in a diner establishment, finds the son who accompanied him has apparently disappeared as if into thin air, never to return. It later transpires that he encounters the perpetrator just outside the diner, so how has he managed to spirit away his son and got back to the pageant in those mere minutes?Years pass, with Hamm unable to get over his loss and attendant guilt, the emotional distance between him and his wife widening close to separation point, when a child's body is unearthed, bearing similarities to his own child and immediately throwing suspicion on a long-interred suspect. The movie then moves back and forth in time from the present-day to 1958 where we see enacted the story of the disappearance (thankfully, there are no scenes depicting the actual murder of the children) of the first child and the truth is gradually brought to light as the stories converge.That's quite a lot to bring together in a mere 90 minutes and after all the exposition, the ending is wound up in double quick time, with a too blatant slip by the murderer and too easily obtained subsequent confession. I also thought the 1958 story was more involving, if more implausible than the present-day one, contriving a "Postman Always Rings Twice" dalliance between the father and a local femme-fatale, complete with jealous husband, unbalancing the narrative, although the transitions between the two time-frames were cleverly done, with dissolves on the shared crime-scene exhibits.The acting was okay, Hamm jutting his jaw and running his hand through his hair in familiar angst-ridden fashion, although I thought the better acting was done by Josh Lucas as his 1950's counterpart, conveying just the right composite of Henry Fonda crossed with James Stewart as the drifter at the mercy of fate, while Morena Baccarin and James Van der Beek playing respectively the slack wife and the murderer made strong, if brief impressions too.In the end, this was a fairly routine thriller, lacking somewhat in tension, characterisation and credibility, with more of the aspects of a TV movie than Hollywood feature. I don't think I'd pay to watch it, seeing it on the small-screen seemed about right.