MICHAEL Caine is magnificent as a demented magician befriending a preteen boy whose parents run a retirement home in “Is Anybody There?” — John Crowley’s far more conventional follow-up to “Boy A.”
Bill Milner (“Son of Rambow”) plays the curious lad, who finds Caine’s sometimes-frightening The Great Clarence fits in with his interest in parapsychology in an English seaside town in 1987.
While Caine is highly watchable, “Is Anybody There?” limns all-too-
familiar and schmaltzy territory for both coming-of-age films and movies with elderly actors, which in this case includes caricatured turns by the likes of such veterans as Rosemary Harris and Sylvia Syms.
Running time: 94 minutes. Rated PG-13 (profanity, disturbing images). At the Lincoln Square, the Cinema 1, the Sunshine.