Critics reviews

It’s not that Songs doesn’t have incident — there are sex scenes, fight fights, rodeos and an exploding car — it’s just that Zhao doesn’t afford them narrative agency or any more weight than the smaller, slice-of-life moments. It’s a sophisticated, human approach...

Made with non-professional actors recruited locally, it’s quite baggy — unlike Zhao’s superb second feature, The Rider, a similar look at reservation life — but there’s plenty going on.

Despite an over-reliance on formula, the film’s understated central performances and loving rapport between JaShaun and her brothers makes its reflection on new legacies a poignant one.

What holds the film together is its unrelenting wonder at being somewhere, and being somewhere perhaps the director, you and I have never been before.

The film is at its transcendent best when Zhao is capturing tiny stolen moments, such as a bicycle ride at dawn, a post-rodeo sing-song or a piggyback stroll at sunset. Beguiling.

The movie is thick with Sundance Film Festival clichés but bittersweet moments too, Johnny like Zhao fixed on the future.

[L]ike her other films, it’s a deeply intelligent and sympathetic rendering of real-life situations, using nonprofessionals playing approximations of themselves.

Zhao nevertheless manages to construct a vivid portrait of a community on the fringes without frills or fuss.

Songs My Brothers Taught Me is a socially relevant and aesthetically impressive film. It considers the hopeful and bleak qualities of underrepresented experiences in equal measure.

Songs My Brothers Taught Me, Chinese-American filmmaker Chloé Zhao's persuasively melancholy socialist realist drama, centers on the circumscribed lives of young Lakotas... Zhao resists courting our sympathy by presenting the Winters' life as squalid, though many Pine Ridge families live without heating, clean water, or sanitation.

The slow-paced film includes all the expected social themes — drinking, poverty, broken families. Where Zhao excels is in the range of emotions she gets from a mostly nonprofessional cast. She refuses to slot these interesting people into another downbeat tale of reservation life. Instead, her camera dwells on the emotional and spiritual reasons young JaShaun, in particular, remains fiercely attached to Pine Ridge.

The story's ending, complete with lyrical voice-over, conveys the beauty and emotional attraction of the place and its traditions, virtues also relayed by Joshua James Richard's sumptuous, sometimes breathtaking cinematography. Other assets include the strong performances Zhao gets from her mostly non-professional cast, and Peter Golub's spare, haunting score.