Icebox

A wrenching, harrowing movie about one Honduran boy's quest for asylum, and the conditions he faces after being apprehended in the United States. Acquired by HBO, the spare project from first-time writer-director Daniel Sawka weds the stark feel and look of a documentary with the emotional wallop that comes from drama.

Icebox is not a documentary. But it does have a spare, naturalistic and awkwardly acted style that helps sell its story, which goes only so far into the legal nuances or politics of the detainee crisis on the southern border. What it’s really about is a kid, caught in a net. ... Icebox is less agitprop than it is an exposé of apathy.

Save for Oscar’s convenient encounter with a reluctantly helpful outsider, Icebox is markedly free of contrivances while winding its way toward a resolution that is at once emotionally satisfying and unsentimentally honest..

Tethered by Gonzalez’s authentic performance, Icebox doesn’t ask for sympathy, nor does it demonize the people Oscar comes in contact with as he tries to remain in the U.S.