There’s a high probability that you’ve seen Sunny Sandler on screen before: Thanks to the patronage of her ceaselessly prolific dad, Adam, the 17-year-old has amassed 26 film credits to date. In “Don’t Say Good Luck,” however, you’ll actually notice her. As a teenager likewise stepping into the spotlight for the first time — and, in rather more bittersweet circumstances, facing the end of childhood — she’s the warmly gawky, thoroughly believable center of Julia Hart‘s sensitive, open-hearted theater-kid portrait. She’s matched beat for beat by Melanie Lynskey, no revelation but reliably affecting and emotionally generous as our heroine’s doting, ailing mother. Coming-of-age films with variations of these characters and dynamics come around pretty often; rather more unusual are those written and played with this degree of care and compassion.
The latest collaboration between Netflix and Adam Sandler‘s Happy Madison Productions, “Don’t Say Good Luck” is markedly more delicate and deeply felt than most films bearing that imprint, though it’s still proudly mainstream in sensibility — unafraid of sentimentality as it lunges directly and most effectively for viewers’ heartstrings. Hart’s family-friendly “Stargirl” films for Disney+ showed she could balance mega-streamer house style with human-feeling storytelling; her more adventurous 2018 superhero indie “Fast Color” demonstrated a mature, cross-generational approach to frequently juvenile genre fare.
