Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
A look at the work and surprising success of a four-year-old girl whose paintings have been compared to the likes of Picasso and has raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars.
A genuinely fascinating documentary that evolves from a charming story about a child prodigy into a deeply unsettling meditation on authenticity, art, media, and parental ambition. The filmmaker's decision to turn the camera on his own complicity and doubt gives the film a rare self-reflexive quality. Novelty is high because few documentaries so honestly interrogate the act of documentary filmmaking itself mid-film. Acting scores low as it's a documentary with non-performers, some of whom feel guarded or coached. Cinematography is competent but unremarkable. The ending is thought-provoking but somewhat inconclusive, leaving viewers in deliberate ambiguity about the central fraud question.