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When their absentee father dies, Johnny feels compelled to strike out for a new life in LA, but fears leaving his sister behind with their remorsefully hard-drinking mother and her latest bad-news boyfriend.
22 July 1967, Anchorage, Alaska, USA
24 April 1995, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
March 26, 2016
An outsider looking in voyeurism veering offensively close to being more about the filmmaker's fixation on her immigrant alienation - if not a blatant exotic poverty porn aesthetic - than the brutal internal isolation of her subjects absent of causality.March 02, 2016
An earnest, smartly mounted film about life on a present-day reservation.March 02, 2016
Viewers will be torn between admiring its laid-back naturalism and wishing it possessed just a little more oomph.April 07, 2016
A moseying tour of life on the Lakota reservation, circa right now: the empty beauty of the badlands, the ancient struggle with alcohol, and the persistent push of youth to make good and make sense of a bad old world that somehow keeps hope alive.March 01, 2016
Because her laissez-faire approach makes little effort to fit the fragmentary scenes into a tidy portrait of reservation life, "Songs My Brothers Taught Me" feels more authentic than if she had chosen to impose a tighter structure.March 02, 2016
The restrained performances and luscious location photography are enough to make this a film worth exploring, though it might not be a bad idea to down a few caffeine-rich drinks before settling in to watch.February 29, 2016
Writer-director Chloe Zhao works methodically to set up Johnny's situation, while also capturing in poetic detail the dead-end lives of poverty, alcoholism and hopelessness on the reservation.March 03, 2016
The film is exceptionally rich -- by turns raw, dreamy, harsh, sensuous, touching, intimate, garrulous, and elliptical.March 12, 2016
Zhao's film is imperfect, but it's a heartfelt and gorgeous one with a very timely story at its core.March 03, 2016
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.November 10, 2016
In Songs My Brothers Taught Me, Zhao and her team have created an emotionally compelling neo-realist portrait of a family and their community experiencing the stresses and pressures of post-colonial life.