Parents' Guide to Fancy Dance

This heartbreaking, unforgettable drama about the power of family bonds and tribal community is a beautifully acted tale of an aunt and her beloved niece. Gladstone, who was remarkably nuanced in Killers of the Flower Moon, is even more evocative here -- Jax is angry and morally ambiguous about everything except the certainty she feels about loving and protecting Roki. Jax is a captivating character because she's flawed but easy to forgive. She just wants to keep raising Roki, even though the system would rather that Frank -- who left the community after Jax and Tawi's mother died years earlier -- and his new White wife become her guardians. As Roki, Deroy-Olson is wonderfully expressive in her moving performance. Whigham and Ryan Begay are also excellent as, respectively, Jax's father and half-brother, who's a tribal cop with no jurisdiction over his sisters' cases.

Writer/director Erica Tremblay's feature is less about the story's law and order angle (unlike Taylor Sheridan's chilling dark crime thriller Wind River), focusing instead on Native American characters and their stories from inside the community, as opposed to White characters surrounding or assigned to work with the tribe. Roki's description of how she feels dancing at the powwow with other Native mothers and daughters is one of the loveliest examples of impactful representation in a movie, as is Jax's explanation that "aunt" in Cayuga means "little mother." The powwow scene is a beautiful and bittersweet sequence, highlighting the story's central relationship. While there are a lot of heavy themes in the movie, that scene is unquestionably full of joy.