1 of 5 | Stephan James stars in “Ricky,” which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Photo courtesy of Sundance Institute

The film parses out information about what led to Ricky’s arrest. Characters reference past events vaguely because they are all familiar with it, as opposed to pointed exposition for the audience.

This not only keeps the audience curious to find out more about the Smith family, but makes the drama more natural. Scenes don’t feel constructed just for a movie.

For Ricky, the demands on parolees, though justified, are so high they create a precarious situation that could collapse at any time. He needs to keep appointments with his parole officer (Sheryl Lee Ralph), find a regular job, attend parolee support meetings, and avoid any felons or drugs, which present themselves around every corner.

Ricky can’t do this alone. He doesn’t have a driver’s license yet and relies on his brother, James (Maliq Johnson) for rides.

It only takes one time for his brother to forget, or love interest Cheryl (Andrene Ward-Hammond) to escalate into a volatile scenario, and Ricky has inadvertently violated his parole.

In many ways, Ricky is still emotionally 15. He’s trying to cope with having missed out on many formative socializing years.

He might take a joke from James personally. He might trigger Cheryl and provoke an even more volatile fight.

The film continues to share more about the Smith family, the neighborhood and even the parole officer late into the film. In the script co-written by director Rashad Frett and Lin Que Ayoung, these are characters with history that only becomes clear when relevant to the current situation.

Ricky’s progress may feel like he takes one step forward and two steps back. However, there is gradual headway.

It takes patience and compassion, powerful emotions with which any piece of art can deal. Ricky embodies that without shying away from the harsh realities of the situation.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.

1 of 5 | Dev Patel plays a sound recordist in “Rabbit Trap,” which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Photo courtesy of Sundance Institute

One day a child (Jade Croot) visits Darcy outside and comes back to the house to meet Daphne. They welcome the kid until he becomes needy and pushy.

The recording of natural sounds in a unique region is interesting and plays well in Dolby Atmos. However, there is only so much watching Patel hold a microphone a viewer can take.

The film shows how Daphne incorporates those sounds into a track, but unfortunately, Rabbit Trap is not a movie about avant-garde music so it gives minimal screen time to that.

The child starts to overstay his welcome, visiting in the early morning and requesting food and drink so he can stay longer. He gets angry that the Davenports never skinned and ate the rabbit he trapped for them.

That’s the rabbit trap. The rabbit trap is also a metaphor for the child trapping the Davenports, but there is an actual rabbit trap in the movie.

A kid from hell is a real problem for an adult couple. How do you force him to leave?

They don’t want to hurt him but they ultimately have to lay hands on him to remove him from their house, which never becomes more of a problem because they’re so remote no other characters enter the story.

Certainly, the kid doesn’t go to child services to report the Davenports for abuse, and he wouldn’t want to get them arrested. He wants to live with them.

The child introduces the Davenports to local mythology which may be somewhat interesting as a different take on demonic legends. They call the ultimate evil The Shadow (Nicholas Sampson).

The mythology too is parsed out very slowly. An hour of that becomes little more than a dry history lesson.

There are some creepy, haunting images in the final half hour. Glass melts, slugs and vegetation overrun the house and more but it is too little too late.

Rabbit Trap will probably interest a very niche audience. For anyone else, it fails to make the case for Welsh folk tales.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.

Movies about irresponsible parenting in the great outdoors have become something of an arthouse subgenre over the past decade. Matt Ross’ Captain Fantastic, Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, India Donaldson’s Good One and Philippe Lesage’s Who by Fire all feature children coming of age in the wilderness as their fathers mess up in one way or another. If there’s perhaps one takeaway from all of these films, it’s to be on guard the next time your dad asks you to go on a long hike or camping trip.

Unfortunately, such a warning was never issued to Roy (Woody Norman), the 13-year-old protagonist of French writer-director Vladimir de Fontenay’s latest feature, Sukkwan Island. Embarking with his father, Tom (Swann Arlaud), on an extended séjour to an isolated cabin somewhere in the Norwegian fjords, Roy soon finds himself facing various life or death scenarios while Tom gradually flies off the handle.

Adapted from David Vann’s 2010 novel, which won several awards in France, the film is a rugged two-hander about a son getting to know his estranged father while they attempt to survive through the long and relentless Nordic winter. As the two are confronted by snowstorms, hungry bears and other external threats, it becomes increasingly clear that the real threat is Tom, a troubled man broken by divorce and seeking to build a bond with a boy he doesn’t ever bother to understand.

Like De Fontenay’s debut feature Mobile Homes, which followed an impoverished family scraping by in upstate New York, Sukkwan Island has a powerful immersive quality that makes up for some of its dramatic shortcomings, especially dialogue that can feel either stilted or too on-the-nose.

Shot with stylized naturalism by Amine Berrada (Banel & Adama), the film plunges us into a breathtaking northern landscape that’s virtually untouched by man. Tom and Roy spend a lot of time trudging through heaping piles of snow or jumping into a lake that looks abominably cold. When they’re not doing other outdoor activities like cutting wood or hunting elk, they’re stuck together in an old cabin that could use some major repairs, including a new roof.

The two are doing this at the urging of Tom, a Frenchman who split with Roy’s mother (Tuppence Middleton) and hasn’t been in the picture for some time. He’s hoping the trip will become a rite of passage through which Roy learns both survival instincts and to appreciate the simple beauties of nature. At least for a few days or weeks, that seems to be the case. But then Roy begins to realize his father is selfish, unhinged and, to cite the above-listed movies, totally irresponsible — to the point that he puts them both in serious danger.

Working under what were clearly harsh conditions, De Fontenay achieves a real level of intimacy with his two performers, whose characters are constantly wavering between moments of affection and resentment. Arlaud (Anatomy of a Fall) portrays Tom as a lost soul with good intentions but no idea how to behave like a proper parent. And the excellent Norman (who starred alongside Joaquin Phoenix in C’mon C’mon) reveals how much Roy wants to love and respect his dad, all the while remaining uneasy around him.

Things inevitably come to a head as the winter grows darker and more hostile, forcing Roy and Tom to resort to extremes so they can survive — especially after their two-way radio is destroyed by the latter, who wants to cut them off entirely from civilization. By that point, it becomes difficult to believe that Tom could be so reckless as to risk their lives, making us wonder if he’s gone completely out of his mind. De Fontenay alludes to this earlier when Roy discovers his dad’s stash of anxiety meds, but it’s otherwise hard to imagine the man would take things so far just to prove that he has terrific survival skills.

Alas, the director tosses in a major, not-worth-spoiling twist at the very last minute to explain all the craziness we’ve been witnessing. The plot reversal does manage to justify how things got far so out of hand, though it also comes across as a major cop-out — so much so that several title cards are inserted at the end to make the finale go down more smoothly.

These kinds of twists, whether in the famous dream season of Dallas or nearly every movie made by M. Night Shyamalan, are, at their best, a chance for the viewer to rethink what they’ve been watching, to see the drama in a new light. In some ways De Fontenay achieves this, but in others he undermines his own film. That doesn’t necessarily take away from the better aspects of Sukkwan Island, especially the lived-in performances and you-are-there quality of the direction. But it makes for shaky ground to stand on, with the risk that everything Roy and Tom just went through ultimately loses its staying power.