Critic Reviews

Firecrackers is not as casually joyful as its title suggests – but it is absolutely as incendiary.

It’s rare for a feature debut to be as fully realized and executed as Firecrackers. It’s as if someone forgot to tell director/writer Mozaffari that making your first feature film is a tough go, filled with doubts, indecision and second guessing; her choices never seem obvious yet always feel right.

Firecrackers isn’t just a confident feature debut from Mozaffari, but a daring one, the kind of fast and furious feminine filmmaking that heralds the arrival of several exciting new talents.

Foul-mouthed, unapologetic, visceral, and authentic, Firecrackers also happens to be sharply edited, its narrative complemented by Casey MQ’s gorgeous electronic ambient/drone score.

This is a movie that, like its characters, is more fluent in feelings than in words.

The actors make the ordinary extraordinary — they give these characters the stature that eludes most superheroes.

Mozaffari has an incredible eye for the details that bring a situation or place to life, working with inexperienced actors to create electrifying characters and a sense of edgy unpredictability.

The story may be overly familiar, but the language is slangy and crude, the sex is teen-impulsive and primitive, and the confrontations — on a littered beach, in that school parking lot, in a pool hall — are alarming. Firecrackers is a simple tale told with a raw ferocity and fuse-burning-down dread for the explosions to come.

Neither over-bleak nor falsely heroic, the movie sensitively observes a short span that, however things work out, is going to be a turning point in their lives.

For all that it dances on familiar ground, Firecrackers ends on a pleasingly opaque note. It’s attractively shot by Catherine Lutes, and smartly cast with unknowns, making it more than just a calling card for its young writer/director. There’s much to take note of here foom Mozaffari and her all-female crew.