Weekend Film Reviews: ‘Teenage Wasteland,’ ‘The Sun Never Sets’

Forget “6-7.” In 1990s Middletown, New York, a high school class figured out how to really drive the adults crazy: exposing a toxic waste scandal in their backyard. A new documentary, Teenage Wasteland, tells the true story of a group of students that stumbled onto a major scoop. To uncover the truth, they followed the money, grilled corrupt local officials and got on the wrong side of the mob. Angelica Jade Bastién, film critic for New York magazine, says the film makes a “beautiful argument” for “civic courage” — that “we should look at the world with curious eyes and not just swallow the mistruths or outright lies of the broken governments we live under.” Katie Walsh, film critic for the Los Angeles Times and the Tribune News Service, says the movie is more 1990s nostalgia trip than heart-pounding thriller. “It is really inspiring to think about how a teacher empowers them to just go out and start asking questions," she says. 

Bastién and Walsh also review Onslaught, The Sun Never Sets, and Boorman and the Devil.

The best film reviewers in the business give you recommendations on what to see and what to skip each week.