Movie reviews: Dìdi, The Instigators, Daughters 

• Focus Features
• Didi

Dìdi
You can spot pieces of a dozen other coming-of-age tales in writer/director Sean Wang's debut feature, but he melds them so deftly with the specificity of his characters' time, place and cultural background that it never feels like you've seen it all before. That time and place is 2008 Fremont, California, where the summer before Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) enters high school finds him dealing with uncertainty about friends, nascent crushes, the impending departure of his older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) for college and tensions in the household as Chris' mother (Joan Chen) raises her kids mostly solo while Chris's father is working abroad. Dìdi certainly capitalizes on the unique adolescent experience of Millennials, with friendships and potential romances revolving around early social-media—it's easy to forget that MySpace was once a pretty big deal—and the first generation growing up with cell phones and attempts to shape their online personas. But the filmmaker also wants to touch on more universal insecurities of being young and not yet sure about your place in the world, especially when those around you keep emphasizing your ethnicity as a defining part of your identity. Young Izaac Wang nails a sweet spot between likeable and kind of typically 14-year-old-boy dickish, while the story finds warmth in the fact that the parents you think will never understand you might be the only people who will ever care unreservedly about you. Available Aug. 9 in theaters. (R)

• Apple TV+
• The Instigators

The Instigators
A creative team with a previous pedigree in fleet-footed capers is, of course, no guarantee that they'll get it right another time, but director Doug Liman (Go, Mr. & Mrs. Smith) and co-stars Matt Damon and Casey Affleck (reunited from the Ocean's trilogy) prove that they understand the assignment. It's the tale of an attempted robbery of the election-night shindig for a corrupt Boston mayor (Ron Perlman), with cash-strapped Marine vet Rory (Damon) and inveterate screw-up ex-con Cobby (Affleck) joining the crew—which, as these things will, doesn't quite go according to plan. Heist-gone-wrong narratives tend toward gritty consequences, but the script by Affleck and Chuck MacLean opts instead for a lighter tone, emphasizing the mismatched dynamics between the taciturn Rory and motor-mouthed Cobby. The chemistry proves effective, even if the hand-wave explanation as to why they'd stick together doesn't feel particularly convincing, because Liman knows to keep the action moving from set piece to set piece, and effectively use callbacks. The killer supporting cast—Michael Stuhlbarg, Alfred Molina, Hong Chau, Ving Rhames, Paul Walter Hauser, Toby Jones—tends to make the movie feel a bit overstuffed, and the token attempts at filling out the protagonists' emotional lives don't quite land. And fortunately, all of that matters little when The Instigators just keeps putting a smile on your face. Available Aug. 9 via AppleTV+. (R)

• Netflix
• Daughters

Daughters
It won the overall audience award for Sundance 2024, and it's easy to understand why; there's undeniable emotion in the story of incarcerated men in a Washington D.C. prison getting a rare one-day opportunity to spend time with their daughters as part of a "Date With Dad" dance event. There are also some structural decisions that both add to the complexity of the story and make it slightly less powerful than it should be. Co-directors Natalie Rae and Angela Patton (the latter of whom co-founded this program) open in 2016, focusing on four men who opt to participate in the seven-week parenting program that's a pre-requisite for the visit, as well as their children, who span a range of ages and feelings about their incarcerated fathers; 5-year-old Audrey is such a delightful dynamo of personality that an entire documentary could be built around her alone. As it turns out, splitting focus presents part of the challenge, as does the way in which the filmmakers follow up on these families over the subsequent seven years, as we see both success stories and sadder developments. The centerpiece sequences involving the dance itself are so emotionally intense that it's understandable the filmmakers might not want to linger too long over the coda, yet it feels like more of that material might have been helpful to get a full picture of where this event succeeded, and where the system fails. Reader, I cried, make no mistake—and I also wanted a chance to explore these stories in the depth they needed. Available Aug. 14 via Netflix. (NR)