Waves

Waves is an ambitious, startling, spectacular over-stuffed and occasionally quite punishing ride. Shults obviously has a lot to say, and insists on saying pretty much all of it, within that just-forgivable 135-minute running time.

The result is impressively atmospheric, but lacking in certain areas.

The film oozes cinematic style (every shot has a point, every camera movement an intention), while Shults's screenplay dives deep and tackles essential themes - parenting, forgiveness and the release of death. It's beautiful work.

All of Shults's stylistic brio and formal inventiveness is finally in the service of a story about love, its mutability and fragility.

The artistic evolution Shults is undergoing makes him as exciting as anyone at work -- he's as sharp as the young Darren Aronofsky, and his heart is only growing larger.

"Waves" is an even deeper plunge into the same pool, but for all its darkness, it's also a work of great tenderness, with a bracing openness to complex new frontiers of human experience.

There are two films here: one is frightening and poignant and the other tender but slight. The first one will haunt me even if the second will fade.

While the movie risks smothering the heart of its drama in all the movement and noise, the sheer sensory overload often leads to astonishing bursts of emotional sophistication.

Propelled by color, energy, electronic music and a quartet of career-making performances, here is that rare sort of cinematic achievement that innovates at every turn, while teaching audiences how to make intuitive sense of the way it pushes the medium.

Technically, it wouldn't be wrong to call Waves a "teen drama," but that generic label doesn't begin to convey the emotional scope of this tender, bruising, exuberant film.