Fancy Dance

Featuring a strong central performance from Lily Gladstone (she was good in Killers of the Flower Moon, but is great here), Fancy Dance is a really solid film about an indigenous woman and her niece who search for her missing sister. The film deftly tackles thorny subject matter (missing and murdered indigenous women), but does so with a light touch, never coming off as ham-fisted or didactic. A lesser version of this movie would have had at least one character give a dramatic monologue about the scope of the issue, and would have ended with text on the screen. Writer/director Erica Tremblay skillfully sidesteps this, and does a great job of making the two main characters people we really come to care about.

*** out of ****