The Bad Kids

Desert flowers can be hard to spot, but are often distinctly beautiful, and The Bad Kids has them in focus.

An insightful, affecting film that casts sympathetic light on a neglected educational sector.

Bolstered by a confident fly-on-the-wall aesthetic and a suitably somber score by Michael Jacaszek, Fulton and Pepe locate both heartbreak and hope in their intertwined tales of people fighting to gain control of their (and others') lives.

Mounted in a serviceable but undistinguished verité manner that eschews talking heads, explanatory titles and other means of conveying information.

The vérité approach in "The Bad Kids" gives viewers insight into a timely issue by literally putting a face on it.

One of the major points The Bad Kids makes is that most "problem students" have common struggles that could be managed with the individualized attention that big public high schools can't provide.

An affecting and enlightening documentary, The Bad Kids offers a fly-on-the-wall look at efforts to help students graduate high school despite their personal struggles and looming sense of hopelessness.

Formulaic, but uplifting and inspiring

Students on the brink of disaster are the subject of this admirably heartfelt and uncondescending documentary.

Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's documentary raises important questions about the limits of pedagogy.

Determined teachers fight long odds in The Bad Kids, a slice-of-life documentary of the struggles in a high school for at-risk youth in California's Mojave Desert.

Sombre yet powerful.