Critics reviews

While We're Young traffics in a specific image of privileged urban whiteness, the kind in which materialism is seen as its opposite and liberalism is merely the fiction of all-inclusiveness. There's undoubtedly an honesty to the film's depiction of this blinkered milieu, but what makes all this a little tricky to parse is Baumbach's increasingly pointed and serious-minded interrogation into realness—in both art and the self.

To be a documentary filmmaker of Longinotto's caliber (her former films include "Divorce Iranian Style," "Salma," "Rough Aunties") you must be a world-class trust-builder. Only when people trust you and the good intentions of your film, will they give you access to their experience. Longinotto's camera is allowed to witness some of the most intimate secrets of these women's lives, and that fact alone is a great testament to the filmmaker and her process.

A rigorously reported yet empathetic investigation of teenage prostitution.

Longinotto has a uniquely internationalist outlook and commitment to politically radical stories based on outsider subjects, captured in a film language whose unobtrusive precision conveys her warmth and respect for her subjects... Dreamcatcher is a film that cares for both its subjects and its audience, unconditionally, an incredible and urgent reinvention of the documentary, and social, contract.

There are extremely haunting moments in this film, and the extent of human suffering depicted is at times almost unfathomable. Yet as with Longinotto's simple, bracingly forthright filmmaking mode, the solution comes from rolling up your sleeves, pounding the pavements and taking names.

The best work of nonfiction artistry I've seen at this Sundance... I've never seen anything so casually devastating. The movie does so much emotional damage because Longinotto doesn't make public service announcements. She's an ingeniously perceptive storyteller whose magic trick is to allow the story to appear to tell itself.

A former prostitute doling out tough love, escape plans and copious condoms to the unsupported sex workers of Chicago, Myers-Powell has a fierce wit and forthright intelligence that brightens even the darkest moments of Kim Longinotto's intensely moving doc.

The straight talk throughout from all is bracing and depressing, the volume of testimony making the urgency of Dreamcatcher's work self-evident... Dreamcatcher is enlightening and sobering, but as a piece of craft it doesn't match the commitment of its subject; it's effectively a selective database of recorded testimony rather than a sculpted take on same. I crave more than advocacy reportage, so take that evaluation as you will.