‘Short Term 12’ is a work of winning sincerity
The most difficult part of making a movie about troubled teenagers is authenticity. With inferior films of this type, either the teenagers won’t seem particularly troubled, or the adults’ attempts to help them will seem insincere and ineffective. Destin Daniel Cretton’s new effort Short Term 12 developed sizable buzz at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year as a film which evades those traps and provides a convincing vision inside a group home. Sundance buzz is not always justified, but in this case the film more than exceeds whatever the Colorado audiences might have said about it.