‘Fancy Dance’ review round-up: Lily Gladstone ‘delivers yet again’ in ‘well-acted’ movie about missing Indigenous women
On June 21, 2024, Apple Original Films released “Fancy Dance” to limited theaters before streaming it on Apple TV+ a week later. The movie stars Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone, Isabel DeRoy-Olson and Shea Whigham. Following her sister’s disappearance, a Native American hustler (Gladstone) kidnaps her niece (DeRoy-Olson) from the child’s white grandparents and sets out for the state powwow in hopes of keeping what is left of their family intact.
With a 97% freshness rating at Rotten Tomatoes, critics are impressed with the movie that premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. The consensus reads, “An urgent drama grounded in its observant depiction of reservation life, ‘Fancy Dance’ establishes director/co-writer Erica Tremblay as a rising filmmaking talent.” Read our full review round-up below.
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Carla Hay of Culture Mix notes, “’Fancy Dance’ is a well-acted story of Native American culture and law enforcement’s treatment of cases involving missing Native American women, who are rarely the focus of narrative feature films. The relationships in the movie are depicted authentically.”
Valerie Complex of Deadline praises the film, stating, “There is an epidemic of missing Indigenous women throughout the US and Canada. These missing persons cases are usually handled poorly due to racism, and sexism which means most of these women aren’t even looked for by the police outside of the reservation, forget about being found.” Continuing, “Tremblay paints a picture of what life is like on a reservation: people in poverty, a fractured justice system, broken homes, and drugs and alcohol abuse. Life is so bleak in some of these locations that tradition is all they have to keep them connected to their culture, and the reason why Jax and Roki are so desperate to get to the Pow wow. Cinematographer Carolina Costa gives the look a film noir sensibility, as characters navigate through the shadows and dark alleyways on and off the reservation.”
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Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com says, “For a film that’s about tough questions and the tragic dynamic that faces young women in Indigenous communities, it ties itself up with a succession of scenes that are just too neat and tidy, but that doesn’t reflect on the pair of performances that never lose their rhythm.” Concluding, “By now, we should all expect greatness from Lily Gladstone, who delivers yet again as Jax, a hustler who is introduced stealing from a fisherman with her niece Roki (the fantastic Isabel Deroy-Olson). Jax is just trying to make ends meet and provide for her loved one as they search for Roki’s missing mother. As the 13-year-old prepares for a mother-daughter show at a powwow, Jax pushes the authorities and her father (Shea Whigham) to do something to find her sister. As the system continues to fail them, Jax and Roki are forced to flee and seek some sort of justice on their own.”
Douglas Davidson of Elements of Madness writes, “In a scant 90 minutes, Tremblay takes the audience on a journey through a specific lens so that while things might seem similar in their description or packaging, there’s undeniable specificity being addressed. This is a story about a ‘family screw-up’ trying to keep what remains of her family together, going to not-so-unreasonable means to do so. In the opening sequence, Jax and Roki are in the woods, each working on a different project when they spot a man fishing and decide to pull a lift. Now, it’s unclear where they are respective to the reservation, but, from my view, if he’s where he’s not supposed to be, that man is acting on presumptive privilege (the same kind that European immigrants used to push the Indigenous peoples of America to the sparse land they live on now) and deserves some piece of comeuppance.”
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