Critics reviews

Rovinelli’s camera in action immediately feels like a jolt into a new kind of trans aesthetic, one that completely engages the viewer and works in harmony with the textual experiment she undertakes.

Although it may have benefitted from a more cohesive structure than the juxtaposition of moments unfolding back and forth in the film’s timeline, Rovinelli’s feature has such a gentle touch, especially when showing the intimate parenthesis of love.

Incorporating protests, nights out in Bushwick and days of coffee and a lot of lying around in bed, So Pretty successfully creates and maintains (despite pushback from the real world seeping in) an atmosphere of concentrated pleasantness that’s a pleasure to sink into.

Rovinelli’s sophomore feature is so eloquent about modern New York life, yet there’s not much else out there like it.

As a document of its moment in time, place and political conjuncture, So Pretty is already of inestimable value, but the film is also marked by assured, sensitive direction and a visual flair that at times matches the intensity of its literary inspiration, proving that low-budget in no way has to mean aesthetically meagre.

Rovinelli seems less interested in telling a traditional story than in capturing a moment, a community, an essence, one we may look to one day as a key document of a specific people in a specific place in an uncertain time.

Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli offers a generational portrait of the transgender youth of today by capturing moments, both fleeting and eternal, of her walks, conversations, breakfasts, sexual experiences, nightly evasion in clubs and participation in political and LGTBI+ collective demonstrations.