Recensioni di Metacritic

This is far from the sort of cinematic experience one revisits time and time again, and it’s clear that’s not the intention; one viewing is all it takes to leave a lasting impression, like the simple memory of a young girl dancing with her dad.

The film is rife with visually lyrical moments that connect viewers with the young ones’ sorrows, fears, insights and hopes.

Daughters culminates with an emotional father-daughter dance inside a Washington, D.C., jail. But its real potency, as both a portrait of families riven by incarceration and a call to action on prisoners’ rights, lies in what comes before and after.

An enormously moving documentary made all the more effective by co-directors Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s steadfast refusal to settle for easy sentiment in the face of difficult outcomes, Daughters has as much ugly-cry potential as any film in recent memory.

Despite the sentimental score, which unnecessarily ramps up the emotion, Daughters is honest about the fact that this programme is not a magic bullet, just one important step on the road to change.

It’s a tender, painful, intimate film, made over several years as we watch four girls in the months before the dance.

The film’s free-flowing, sometimes experimental structure proves evocative.

The importance of touch between a parent and child—and, in the case of this film, specifically between a father and daughter—is rarely discussed openly in Daughters, but it looms large over nearly every scene.

Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s Daughters targets viewers squarely and simultaneously in the head and the heart, succeeding much more effectively at the latter, presumably with the hope that the former will follow.

Despite not ending on its strongest note, Daughters is still a highly effective documentary overall. Working with subjects this young and topics this sensitive can be challenging, and you always run the risk of feeling exploitative, but Daughters handles both with compassion and care.