Fancy Dance becomes part coming-of-age story, part road movie, and part revenge thriller with Tremblay effectively guiding Gladstone and Deroy-Olson through the tropes of each subgenre.

| Sep 17, 2024

Fancy Dance toggles between a thriller, a murder mystery, a road movie, and a social drama, and if the shifts aren't always smooth, the fine performances and an undercurrent of fury toward the injustices faced by Indigenous women hold it together.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 25, 2024

It's maybe a little too subtle, but the performances and sense of place are so strong.

| Jul 13, 2024

It’s an elegant film with a lot of restraint but packed with emotions.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 12, 2024

This one finds its heart in the gray areas. Tremblay and her actors show us characters compelled to do reckless and inexplicable things for painstakingly human reasons.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 9, 2024

Lily Gladstone does quality work as the absent woman's sister, searching for her while bonding with her anxious daughter.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 4, 2024

While Fancy Dance has a tendency to labour its points a little too emphatically, Gladstone and Deroy-Olson are both phenomenal; their connection, played out in shared glances and urgent wordless messages, is palpable, persuasive and vital.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 1, 2024

Lily Gladstone appeared in two films in 2023. Martin Scorsese’s white-centered Killers of the Flower Moon received all the attention, but Erica Tremblay’s Fancy Dance is so far superior that it feels like an insult to even compare them.

| Jun 29, 2024

Erica Tremblay has a background in documentary-making and brings an unflinching eye to her depiction of life on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation in Oklahoma.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 28, 2024

One of those small-scale indie films that examine social issues through the micro-lens of individual lives, so that the audience gets a sense of the systemic problems that impact the characters’ choices without the director ever having to mount a soapbox

| Jun 28, 2024

An essential, important Indigenous drama. It’s eye-opening in the subject matter it tackles, while also being a well-told familial tale.

| Jun 28, 2024

As usual, Gladstone is excellent, and she doesn’t mind ceding the spotlight to Deroy-Olson. The two craft a convincing family unit, one we don’t want to see broken. And though the film hits familiar plot beats, it loses none of its redemptive power.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 28, 2024

A potent, layered and beautiful heartache of a movie grappling with traumas but finding hope and even joy in the bond between these women, and the way they hold onto their culture and these ceremonies that have resisted and survived colonization.

| Jun 28, 2024

There’s bitter, there’s sour, but there are also moments that are wonderfully sweet...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 27, 2024

Tremblay’s film is not always graceful — the dialogue and acting can be stilted, and one hopes for a little more formal rigor — but it’s a strong debut undergirded by a palpably real emotional core and an un-showy sense of the reality of reservation life.

| Jun 27, 2024

A finely crafted drama about a woman and her niece who are unwilling to let the hopelessness of her situation define her.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 27, 2024

Gladstone’s performance is looser, more open, less reserved. Simply put: she does more acting, and gives strength and substance to a dense, knotty family drama which though maybe anticlimactic in the final act is fluent and heartfelt.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 26, 2024

In a movie that reminds us that parenting comes in many forms, it’s touching to learn that the Cayuga word for “aunt” is “small mother.”

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 26, 2024

Gladstone, Deroy-Olson and Tremblay have found a way to breathe real life into that story.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 26, 2024

A thoughtful, affecting debut feature from Tremblay that puts a necessary spotlight on Indigenous peoples -- featuring another exceptional performance from Lily Gladstone.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 25, 2024