Though it runs just 93 minutes, this cinema-verite documentary by Bing Liu manages to feel like an epic.

| Mar 24, 2020

It will warm your heart but possibly break it a little too.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 2, 2019

This is a movie about what people are prepared to swallow when they're thirsty for love.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 24, 2019

Liu documents his friends' fitful steps towards adulthood. He explores the way that violence can write itself into the DNA of a community, recurring in subsequent generations.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 23, 2019

Powerful. Very insightful because it's so intimate.

| Mar 22, 2019

It is impossibly gripping, terribly personal, but always compassionate.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 22, 2019

The ruthless manner in which he has hacked a decade's worth of footage into 93 taut minutes alone qualified him for Oscar consideration.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 22, 2019

It's as if all its director Bing Liu had to do was put the idea for his film at the top of a steep hill, give it a prod, then keep filming as natural forces took care of the rest.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 21, 2019

Each boy is likeable, troubled, searching, and hypnotically watchable in the way he puts his features on record, dimly conscious that his feelings are playing those features like a needle on a disc.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 20, 2019

This is a fluent, watchable piece of work, though not quite as lucid as it might have been.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 20, 2019

Its skating sequences are impressive, but it's the intimate examinations of fracturing friendships and emerging adulthood that make Minding The Gap surprisingly resonant.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 19, 2019

A profound study of youth, adulthood and the space in between.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 19, 2019

It soon becomes apparent that all three of them are struggling to become adults while dealing with the legacies of childhoods devastated by family violence.

| Mar 13, 2019

The ambition of Minding the Gap is a bit beyond the reach of Liu. It may be that only a dramatic film artist could have done justice to this subject. But as a piece of cinematic self-therapy, fragmented though it is, it has few rivals.

| Original Score: B+ | Feb 1, 2019

Minding the Gap becomes less a story about the ad hoc fraternity of skateboarders and more about the fractured home life that sends them looking for a surrogate family.

| Dec 26, 2018

The skateboarding footage is pretty stunning in its gracefulness ... a thrilling diversion from all the trouble we're witnessing, just as it is for the subjects themselves.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 14, 2018

The score by Nathan Halpern and Chris Ruggiero is sparse and beautiful and perfect. The editing is brilliant.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 30, 2018

Much of "Minding the Gap" is painful to witness, but as past and present intersect and recombine and Liu's wealth of footage coalesces, the finished film becomes a cautiously hopeful and even cathartic experience.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 30, 2018

It's the movie Liu was born to make, the one he had to get off his chest before he could move on in his filmmaking career.

| Aug 21, 2018

In a world full of images...Bing's movie stands out for the complexity of its integrity, and its ability to reveal his own experiences empathically.

| Aug 20, 2018