Can't be touched off the grounds

Short Term 12

Crit

As a rule I don't have much use for films that tread so shakily that tightrope between sentiment and sentimentality, and that telegraph their punches so consistently. But there's something about this slice of group-home life--troubled children tended by people who were children themselves only a week or so ago--that makes me cut it all the slack it needs. That something would be the spot-on performances, by the leads Brie Larson and John Gallagher Jr., but also by every young actor we see, particularly Kaitlyn Dever as Jayden, in whom the Larson character terrifyingly recognizes herself, and Keith Stanfield as Marcus, brilliant but seemingly doomed, as he approaches 18 and automatic ejection into the ugly world whence he came.

I knew where I had seen Larson recently--she was the other girlfriend in The Spectacular Now--but I spent the whole film trying to place the impossibly likable Gallagher, and now I'm going to look him up. Oh! Of course: he's the impossibly likable Jim in HBO's The Newsroom.

Anyway, see this.