Under Puenzo's attentive yet strangely enervated direction, there's not much dramatic urgency here.

Lucía Puenzo’s first film, a coming-of-age tale about Alex (Efron), an intersex 15-year-old referred to usually by female pronouns, is a noble addition to the genre, but becomes too hermetically sealed by its own social-outreach mission.

See it not only because it works as an exquisitely tendered emotional experience, but also because it is the first cinematic treatment in fictional form of a taboo-breaking ticklish subject.

It takes a controlling hand to chisel something more contoured than monotony out of this dense angst, and director Lucía Puenzo doesn't have it.

Exquisitely acted story of a intersex teenage 15-year-old girl who will not commit herself to surgery to correct the duality of genitalia.

There's a secret at the heart of XXY, but the real mystery is why writer-director Lucía Puenzo insists on unnecessary symbolic gestures for a story otherwise told with delicacy, restraint, and maturity.

The Argentine writer-director downplays the clinical angle and avoids easy melodramatic pitfalls.

Traz um final em aberto que, ao invés de enriquecer a narrativa ao honrar sua complexidade, soa mais como uma incapacidade do próprio filme em encontrar algo relevante a dizer.