• Latest
  • Trending
Just Kids Review

Just Kids Review: On the Fragility of Becoming

Back to the Frontier Review

Back to the Frontier Review: Three Families, Eight Weeks, Zero Wi-Fi

Too Much Review

Too Much Review: How Netflix’s Rom-Com Redefines Post-Millennial Romance

Dexter Resurrection Review

Dexter: Resurrection Review: The Devil Takes Manhattan

Jaume Collet Serra

Netflix Seals Multi-Year Pact With Carry-On Director Jaume Collet-Serra

6 hours ago
Byeon Woo seok

Netflix Greenlights Live-Action Solo Leveling With Byeon Woo-seok

6 hours ago
Joe Locke

Joe Locke to Lead Samuel D. Hunter’s Clarkston in West End Debut

6 hours ago
Cierra Ortega

Cierra Ortega Ousted From Love Island USA After Racist Posts Surface

6 hours ago
Kyle MacLachlan

MacLachlan, Long Join Amazon’s You Deserve Each Other

6 hours ago
Disney and ITV

Disney+ and ITVX Swap Hit Shows in Landmark UK Content Deal

7 hours ago
Keanu Reeves

Keanu Reeves Spends Thousands Monthly Battling Deep-Fake Profiles

7 hours ago
Zodiac Killer Project

Sundance Winner ‘Zodiac Killer Project’ Courts Netflix, Amazon in Post-Festival Scramble

7 hours ago
K-Pops! Review

K-Pops! Review: Anderson .Paak’s Winning Performance

  • Home
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Gazettely Review Guidelines
Thursday, July 10, 2025
GAZETTELY
  • Home
  • Movie and TV News
    Jaume Collet Serra

    Netflix Seals Multi-Year Pact With Carry-On Director Jaume Collet-Serra

    Byeon Woo seok

    Netflix Greenlights Live-Action Solo Leveling With Byeon Woo-seok

    Joe Locke

    Joe Locke to Lead Samuel D. Hunter’s Clarkston in West End Debut

    Cierra Ortega

    Cierra Ortega Ousted From Love Island USA After Racist Posts Surface

    Kyle MacLachlan

    MacLachlan, Long Join Amazon’s You Deserve Each Other

    Disney and ITV

    Disney+ and ITVX Swap Hit Shows in Landmark UK Content Deal

    Keanu Reeves

    Keanu Reeves Spends Thousands Monthly Battling Deep-Fake Profiles

    Zodiac Killer Project

    Sundance Winner ‘Zodiac Killer Project’ Courts Netflix, Amazon in Post-Festival Scramble

    The Morning Show

    Deep-Fake Dilemmas Await in “The Morning Show” Season 4

  • Movie and TV Reviews
    Back to the Frontier Review

    Back to the Frontier Review: Three Families, Eight Weeks, Zero Wi-Fi

    Too Much Review

    Too Much Review: How Netflix’s Rom-Com Redefines Post-Millennial Romance

    Dexter Resurrection Review

    Dexter: Resurrection Review: The Devil Takes Manhattan

    K-Pops! Review

    K-Pops! Review: Anderson .Paak’s Winning Performance

    Just Kids Review

    Just Kids Review: On the Fragility of Becoming

    Under a Dark Sun Review

    Under a Dark Sun Review: Come for the Mystery, Stay for Isabelle Adjani

    Unwrapping Christmas: Tina's Miracle Review

    Unwrapping Christmas: Tina’s Miracle Review: A Study in Fortunate Errors

    Battle Camp Review

    Battle Camp Review: Summer Camp Nostalgia Meets Reality TV Calculation

    A Tragedy Foretold Flight 3054 Review

    A Tragedy Foretold: Flight 3054 Review – How Netflix Turns Tragedy Into Accountability

  • Game Reviews
    Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 Review

    Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 Review: Dropping In Again

    Best Served Cold Review

    Best Served Cold Review: A Bartender’s Guide to Murder and Mystery

    Broken Arrow Review

    Broken Arrow Review: A War on Two Fronts—Gameplay and Design

    Cast n Chill Review

    Cast n Chill Review: The Smartest Fishing Game You’ll Play

    Battle Train Review

    Battle Train Review: One Step Forward, Two Tracks Back

    Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game Review

    Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game Review – A Solo Dev’s Triumph

    GEX Trilogy Review

    GEX Trilogy Review: It’s Tail Time, One More Time

    Berserk or Die Review

    Berserk or Die Review: Controlled Chaos in a Pixelated Arena

    Zombie Army VR Review

    Zombie Army VR Review: Nazi Zombies Get the VR Treatment They Deserve

  • The Bests
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Movie and TV News
    Jaume Collet Serra

    Netflix Seals Multi-Year Pact With Carry-On Director Jaume Collet-Serra

    Byeon Woo seok

    Netflix Greenlights Live-Action Solo Leveling With Byeon Woo-seok

    Joe Locke

    Joe Locke to Lead Samuel D. Hunter’s Clarkston in West End Debut

    Cierra Ortega

    Cierra Ortega Ousted From Love Island USA After Racist Posts Surface

    Kyle MacLachlan

    MacLachlan, Long Join Amazon’s You Deserve Each Other

    Disney and ITV

    Disney+ and ITVX Swap Hit Shows in Landmark UK Content Deal

    Keanu Reeves

    Keanu Reeves Spends Thousands Monthly Battling Deep-Fake Profiles

    Zodiac Killer Project

    Sundance Winner ‘Zodiac Killer Project’ Courts Netflix, Amazon in Post-Festival Scramble

    The Morning Show

    Deep-Fake Dilemmas Await in “The Morning Show” Season 4

  • Movie and TV Reviews
    Back to the Frontier Review

    Back to the Frontier Review: Three Families, Eight Weeks, Zero Wi-Fi

    Too Much Review

    Too Much Review: How Netflix’s Rom-Com Redefines Post-Millennial Romance

    Dexter Resurrection Review

    Dexter: Resurrection Review: The Devil Takes Manhattan

    K-Pops! Review

    K-Pops! Review: Anderson .Paak’s Winning Performance

    Just Kids Review

    Just Kids Review: On the Fragility of Becoming

    Under a Dark Sun Review

    Under a Dark Sun Review: Come for the Mystery, Stay for Isabelle Adjani

    Unwrapping Christmas: Tina's Miracle Review

    Unwrapping Christmas: Tina’s Miracle Review: A Study in Fortunate Errors

    Battle Camp Review

    Battle Camp Review: Summer Camp Nostalgia Meets Reality TV Calculation

    A Tragedy Foretold Flight 3054 Review

    A Tragedy Foretold: Flight 3054 Review – How Netflix Turns Tragedy Into Accountability

  • Game Reviews
    Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 Review

    Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 Review: Dropping In Again

    Best Served Cold Review

    Best Served Cold Review: A Bartender’s Guide to Murder and Mystery

    Broken Arrow Review

    Broken Arrow Review: A War on Two Fronts—Gameplay and Design

    Cast n Chill Review

    Cast n Chill Review: The Smartest Fishing Game You’ll Play

    Battle Train Review

    Battle Train Review: One Step Forward, Two Tracks Back

    Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game Review

    Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game Review – A Solo Dev’s Triumph

    GEX Trilogy Review

    GEX Trilogy Review: It’s Tail Time, One More Time

    Berserk or Die Review

    Berserk or Die Review: Controlled Chaos in a Pixelated Arena

    Zombie Army VR Review

    Zombie Army VR Review: Nazi Zombies Get the VR Treatment They Deserve

  • The Bests
No Result
View All Result
GAZETTELY
No Result
View All Result
Just Kids Review

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 Review: Dropping In Again

K-Pops! Review: Anderson .Paak's Winning Performance

Home Entertainment Movies

Just Kids Review: On the Fragility of Becoming

Naser Nahandian by Naser Nahandian
7 hours ago
in Entertainment, Movies, Reviews
Reading Time: 4 mins read
A A
0
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on PinterestShare on WhatsAppShare on Telegram

There is a sound that a state makes when it turns its gaze upon a life, a low hum of legislative machinery that seeks to define existence from a distance. In this noise, the individual soul can become an abstraction, a problem to be solved. Gianna Toboni’s documentary, Just Kids, is an act of defiance against this hum.

It does not argue; it simply shows. We are introduced to the quiet worlds of three young people: Rae in South Carolina, a boy of fifteen years, and in Texas, the effervescent seventeen-year-old Alazaiah and the watchful fourteen-year-old Tristan.

They are not subjects of a debate. They are human beings caught in the gears of policy, their futures contingent on votes cast in rooms they will never enter. The film watches, with a patient and devastating stillness, as the architecture of law presses down upon the intimate spaces of their becoming, revealing the profound weight of a life lived under scrutiny.

The Gravity of Love

In a landscape of ideological fractures, where does one find solid ground? The film suggests an answer, one that is as ancient as it is startling in this context: the family. Not an idealized portrait, but something far more potent, a gravity of love that holds a forming self together.

Just Kids Review

We see a veteran father, a man whose identity is intertwined with the defense of country, pivot to defend something more elemental: his own child. The sight of this man, who carries a gun, standing vulnerable before legislative bodies, his voice steady but his purpose absolute, reveals a profound truth about protection. It is not an abstract principle but a deeply personal, sacred duty.

We witness Tristan’s mother, a former correctional officer accustomed to systems of control, reject the state’s claim on her daughter’s body. Her defiance is not born of political theory but of a mother’s instinct, a clear-eyed declaration that her child’s care is a sovereign territory.

When Alazaiah’s mother passes, her young brothers form a circle of care, their shared grief forging a shelter against a world that offers none. This steadfastness, this unshakeable loyalty from the most unexpected corners, becomes the film’s moral anchor. It establishes these homes not merely as supportive, but as sanctuaries where a child’s identity is allowed to breathe, making the external world’s judgment feel all the more profane.

The Fragility of Being

What does it mean to care for a self that is still taking shape? The film demystifies the act, stripping it of political baggage and revealing its simple, existential essence. To affirm a gender is sometimes as gentle an act as a haircut. In the moments after Rae’s hair is shorn to match the boy he is, a light turns on behind his eyes; a new way of standing in the world is born.

Just Kids Review

A quiet, monumental event where inner and outer reality achieve, for a moment, a fragile harmony. This delicate process of self-creation is then held against the brutal machinery of its opposition, a force that seeks not to build but to dismantle.

The anonymous hatred of phone calls, the shadow of FBI agents assigned for protection, the bureaucratic violence of a Child Protective Services threat—each is an attempt to un-make a person, to instill a fear that one’s own body is a crime scene. In one devastating sequence, a doctor on a screen informs Tristan that the law now stands between them.

The digital interface, a tool of connection, becomes a sterile wall, and a lifeline is severed through a webcam. The doctor’s departure is more than a loss of care; it is the system itself turning its back, a cold demonstration of how an impersonal policy can inflict a deeply personal wound and abandon a child to the wilderness.

The Unchosen Exile

Youth should be a kingdom of its own, a space for the messy, unobserved work of becoming. But for these children, the borders of that kingdom have been breached. They are dispossessed of their own adolescence, forced into a premature adulthood where their time is consumed by legislative dockets and safety plans.

The right to be ordinary, to be invisible, is a luxury they are not afforded. They are, as the film makes terrifyingly clear, internal refugees—exiles in their own homeland. The familiar geography of their towns becomes alien territory, charged with potential menace. This displacement is not just physical but psychic, a constant, low-grade dread of being a foreigner in the only place you have ever known.

For families like Tristan’s, the cruelty is compounded by economics. The law does not just reject her identity; it weaponizes her mother’s financial precarity, chaining them to a hostile environment from which they cannot afford to flee.

This paralysis, the inability to move toward safety, is its own kind of prison. The film’s formal simplicity becomes its greatest asset here. It offers no cinematic distractions from this truth. There is no neat resolution, because the story is not over. It leaves us with a portrait of persistence, the quiet, weary, day-to-day act of continuing to be, even when the path ahead is a question mark.

Just Kids is a documentary film directed by Gianna Toboni. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 7, 2025.

Full Credits

Director: Gianna Toboni

Writers: Gianna Toboni, Jacqueline Toboni, Samantha Wender

Producers: Jacqueline Toboni, Samantha Wender, Gianna Toboni

Executive Producers: Samantha Wender, Mathilde Jourdan

Cast: Susan Stryker, Andrea Jenkins

Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Daniel Hollis

Editors: Sasha Perry, Yasu Tsuji

Composer: Taul Katz 

The Review

Just Kids

9 Score

Just Kids forgoes the political sermon for a hushed, intimate vigil. It finds a profound, aching beauty in the fierce gravity of family love holding a fragile identity together. A somber and unflinching document of resilience, it bears witness to the quiet violence of legislation and the unchosen exile of children forced to be warriors. It is a necessary, devastating, and deeply human film.

PROS

  • An intimate and powerful human focus that transcends political debate.
  • A surprising and moving portrayal of unwavering family love and support.
  • Effectively illustrates the real-world consequences of abstract legislation.
  • Emotionally resonant and deeply empathetic filmmaking.

CONS

  • The subject matter is relentlessly grim and emotionally taxing.
  • Its conventional documentary style may feel familiar.
  • The lack of a clear resolution reflects reality but may leave viewers unsettled.

Review Breakdown

  • Overall 0
Tags: Andrea JenkinsDocumentaryDramaFeaturedGianna ToboniJacqueline ToboniJust KidsSamantha WenderSusan Stryker
Previous Post

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 Review: Dropping In Again

Next Post

K-Pops! Review: Anderson .Paak’s Winning Performance

Try AI Movie Recommender

Gazettely AI Movie Recommender

This Week's Top Reads

  • Man Finds Tape Review

    Man Finds Tape Review: The Smartest Horror Film of the Year

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Brick Review: When the Walls Are Within

    1 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Mix Tape Review: A Story Told on Two Sides of a Cassette

    1 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Pretty Thing Review: A Stylish Thriller Without the Thrills

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • 25 Biggest Celebrity Scandals of the 2010s

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • The Sandman Season 2 Review: Portrait of a Ponderous God

    1 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Art Detectives Review: The Case of the Brilliant Man and the Underwritten Woman

    204 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0

Must Read Articles

Too Much Review
Entertainment

Too Much Review: How Netflix’s Rom-Com Redefines Post-Millennial Romance

4 hours ago
Dexter Resurrection Review
Entertainment

Dexter: Resurrection Review: The Devil Takes Manhattan

4 hours ago
Unwrapping Christmas: Tina's Miracle Review
Movies

Unwrapping Christmas: Tina’s Miracle Review: A Study in Fortunate Errors

8 hours ago
Broken Arrow Review
Reviews Games

Broken Arrow Review: A War on Two Fronts—Gameplay and Design

1 day ago
Gachiakuta Review
TV Shows

Gachiakuta Review: Forged in Refuse, Rushed to the Screen

1 day ago
Loading poll ...
Coming Soon
Who is the best director in the horror thriller genre?

Gazettely is your go-to destination for all things gaming, movies, and TV. With fresh reviews, trending articles, and editor picks, we help you stay informed and entertained.

© 2021-2024 All Rights Reserved for Gazettely

What’s Inside

  • Movie & TV Reviews
  • Game Reviews
  • Featured Articles
  • Latest News
  • Editorial Picks

Quick Links

  • Home
  • About US
  • Contact Us
  • Advertise with Us
  • Review Guidelines

Follow Us

Facebook X-twitter Youtube Instagram
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Movies
  • Entertainment News
  • Movie and TV Reviews
  • TV Shows
  • Game News
  • Game Reviews
  • Contact Us

© 2024 All Rights Reserved for Gazettely