Spielberg’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s coming of age novel follows Jim Graham (13 year old Bale), a British boy caught in the upheaval of the 1941 Japanese invasion of Shanghai. Separated from his family and later taken as a prisoner of war—along with Basie (Malkovich), an American sailor who has befriended him—Jim finds in a Japanese interment camp a substitute for his lost home even as he witnesses violence and brutality that strip him of his childhood innocence.