Autism & Down Syndrome

Two sisters, 11-year-old Amanda and 16-year-old Laurel, run away from their different foster parents and sleep in model homes and wherever else they can. But when Laurel becomes pregnant. they realize they can't handle this crisis on their own. With nowhere else to turn, they decide to kidnap Elaine, a clerk in a baby-supply store. But Elaine seems to need Manny and Lo just as much as they need her.

A distant, slightly dysfunctional family is brought closer together when the father's long-estranged Uncle Nino comes from Italy to Chicago for a surprise visit.

After her father's stroke, the offbeat Mona Gray gives up of all the things she likes expecting that her father will be better. When she is 20, her mother kicks her out and lies to her friend Ms. Gelband, a school principal, that Mona is a college graduate and qualified to teach third-grade mathematics, so the principal hires her. Once she settles in, Mona feels drawn to orphan Lisa Venus, and her odd behavior attracts the attention of teacher Ben Smith. One incident at school changes Mona's life for good.

The Girl in the Book charts the journey of young woman's transformation. At the outset, Alice Harvey is a lost and self-destructive 29 year old girl unable to write, too damaged for love. When her past invades her present and forces her to confront painful memories, she shatters. Helped by her friend and a new love interest, she slowly rediscovers her creative voice.

Cora, a disenchanted and troubled young woman, begrudgingly answers phones at a Prayer Call Center under the watchful direction of its religious leader Bill. When her prayers start making a difference, one caller shows up convinced he's been saved by her voice. With the discovery of her newfound gift, Cora struggles to reconcile her troubled past, and grapples with the faith that others have started to show in her.

The oddest couple takes an unforgettable journey through the American Southwest, finding happiness in the unlikeliest of places and seeing in each other what no one else has seen before. Maya is a product of childhood abuse who escapes her shattered life in Los Angeles and meets Duncan, a hermit from a tiny town. He is socially awkward and a slave to pattern and routine, but a master of map-making and directions. Their journey teaches Maya to care for someone else and takes Duncan into a new world. Their road trip is filled with unexpected surprises and hard realities that redefine the notion of family.

Nervous little 104-pound sophomore Michael Peck would like to join the wrestling team, but when he breeches the subject to his intellectual-snob parents after getting booted from band, they're unable to hear him and prepare a contract for him to join the Science Club instead (a parent-child agreement documented in legal terms which he is forced to sign and obligated to maintain). Skipping school with his best bud Geiger, they run across two senior girls, Emily and Becca, also skipping. Peck and Emily begin a tenuous relationship, mostly due to Peck's interest in her. They are worlds apart in savvy (she with much, he with none), but it's interactions with her and experiences in his classes that shape Peck's forced-upon science fair project, which, when presented, rocks the genuinely indifferent and platitude-numbed school system from its slumbering core.

16 year old street-wise Apple (Vanessa Hudgens) has never had an easy life. Her mother, June Bailey (Rosario Dawson), is an addict and prostitute, is verbally and physically abusive, and is grooming her daughter to follow in her footsteps. Apple knows the streets, alleys and motels like the back of her hand but wants more from her life. She possesses a tenacious, tough, indomitable spirit, and will not surrender to fate. Apple runs away from her mother and tracks down her father whom she has never known, as he was only 19 when he got Apple's mother pregnant. Apple begs her now Wall Street Broker father, Tom Fitzpatrick (Brendan Fraser), to take her in. In the few days under her father's care, she learns she's become pregnant by a kid from the streets she met on the train, who now wants nothing to do with her. She is forced to leave her father's home because of her choice to give birth to the baby she is carrying. Apple runs away again, and is eventually taken under the wing of Father McCarthy (James Earl Jones), the chaplain of the local hospital after almost getting herself killed. He offers to let Apple live at a shelter for pregnant young women run by a spiritual woman named Kathy (Ann Dowd). It is here that Apple begins to tentatively interact with the other girls who are in the same predicament as she and gradually begins to make a family for herself.

Moon Blake is raised by his loving but government-paranoid father Oliver in a hidden cave in the Alabama forests. Oliver dies from a leg wound he refuses to have medically treated, so Moon is told to move away, alone, and start a new home in the Alaskan wild-lands. Constable Sanders, however - the mean local cop - finds the boy with his father's guns, abuses him and has him locked away till majority age for 'assault' within Mr. Gene's grim Pinson home for boys. Moon soon makes friends with shy, sickly Kit and apparent bully Hal, then sets up a mass escape, on which only the trio actually follows through. Sanders fails to catch them, but the unforgiving elements reshuffle the cards dramatically. An uncle is meanwhile found.

After their parents abandon the family, a young woman works to take care of her younger siblings.

The poignant yet humor filled story about a single mother of a teenager severely impacted by autism, forced to reckon with her daughter's future. As her child becomes an adult, what used to work, no longer does. What will sustain her daughter, and herself? A parent-child love story, when love means letting go.

A feisty foster kid's outrageous scheme to be reunited with her birth mother has unintended consequences in The Great Gilly Hopkins, an entertaining film for the entire family. Gilly Hopkins (Sophie Nélisse) has seen more than her share of foster homes and has outwitted every family she has lived with. In an effort to escape her new foster mother Maime Trotter's (Kathy Bates) endless loving care, Gilly concocts a plan that she believes will bring her mother running to her rescue. But when the ploy blows up in Gilly's face it threatens to ruin the only chance she's ever had to be part of a real family. Based on the award-winning young-adult novel by Katherine Paterson (Bridge to Terabithia), The Great Gilly Hopkins stars Sophie Nélisse, Kathy Bates, Julia Stiles, Bill Cobbs, Billy Magnussen, with Octavia Spencer and Glenn Close.

A baseball player whose professional career was cut short due to personal problems is suddenly awakened and invigorated by a young-man with Down syndrome who works at the local grocery store. Calvin Campbell is a retired baseball player and a father to Katie Campbell,an independent teenager. One day when he goes shopping for alcohol at the local market he meets an employee of the market. He talks to produce and is shocked when produce gives him a hug..

Based on one of the most beloved Young Adult novels of all time: Two kids are stripped naked and left together on an island in a lake - victims of a vicious summer camp prank; But rather than have to return to camp and face the humiliation, they decide to take off, on the run together. What follows is a three day odyssey of discovery and self-discovery.

Kelly once played in a punk band. Now, after giving birth to her son and moving into a cozy (boring) suburb, she can't feel comfortable in the role of perfect mom/exemplary wife. Her 17-year-old neighbor Calvin, wheelchair-bound after an accident, also can't get used to his new position. A fleeting conversation between two people forced to spend much more time at home gives rise to a tender friendship in which both find what they lacked. Kelly, once a punk-rocker turned suburban mom, is nostalgic for a life she can no longer have and uncertain of a future into which she doesn't yet fit; 17-year-old Cal is frustrated at his loss of control of his life. The pair's unlikely friendship is the perfect spark needed to thrust them both back into life.

In the wonderfully dysfunctional tradition of The Royal Tenenbaums, teenage years are always messy... but for Maude, things couldn't seem more tragic. Within one week just prior to her 18th birthday, she is suspended from school, stranded by her best friend, dumped by the boy she "loves", and Granny just died leaving her an enormous amount of money under one condition: Maude must go to college which she does not want to do and her wildly eccentric family is no help at all. Of course... It's a comedy!

Jane is a young woman with Asperger's syndrome who is living with her parents in Queens, New York. Bianca is her extremely protective older sister who is now moving in with her fiancé, Rob, in Brooklyn. Jane's parents are now moving to the suburbs of New Jersey and they want Jane to move in with Bianca. Bianca and Rob are not sure once they are ready for that kind of responsibility though, and Jane decides she wants her first boyfriend. This causes some strife to the point where it chafes at Jane's growing independence despite ambient noise creeping into her attention. Eventually, this leads to Bianca trying to dissuade one of her friends, Jack, from dating Jane as she views him as too unreliable for her sister.

Ben and Alan, two misfit best friends incapable of growing up, find direction for their lives by taking in an abandoned child and creating the family they've always needed.