Shawn Spencer: Good morning, detectives! Collecting donations for the Policeman’s Ball?
Carlton Lassiter: We don’t have balls.
Shawn Spencer: I honestly have no response for that.
Carlton Lassiter: Need I remind you, Mr. Spencer, what happens when you interfere with a police investigation?
Shawn Spencer: Uhhh … The case gets solved?– From the USA Network series Psych
Murder mysteries typically operate within the same set of rules regardless of what era or community they are born from: someone dies, someone investigates, and someone is caught. Whether it’s Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, Philip Marlowe or Benoit Blanc, Adrian Monk or Richard Castle, the set-up and execution of the tale remain identical, only the details and execution spice things up. Unto every generation, there is an investigator and Oliver Odwazny-Beebe is set to make his own Detective Oliver the next to join the pantheon. And he’s off to a decent start. Co-directed by Cynthia Lowen (Battleground; Netizens) and Jon Cohrs (Back Water), Kids Like Me mixes slice-of-life with a making-of documentary in order to showcase one child’s pursuit to fulfil a dream and is having its world premiere in the Documentary Competition section of Tribeca Film Festival 2026.
Twelve-year-old Oliver Odwazny-Beebe absolutely loves murder mysteries, enjoying the cleverness that each tale utilizes to craft quandaries only the observant can solve. Following Oliver and his family for the better part of a school year, Kids Like Me uses a mixture of captured footage, talking head interviews, and formalized film footage as it tracks his progress at school and at home as he navigates physical limitations due to a disability and the ramifications of the limitations, as well as progress on his dream project to write, direct, and star in his own murder mystery production.
L-R: Oliver Odwazny-Beebe and Chad Odwazny in KIDS LIKE ME. Photo courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival.
Executive produced by several individuals, including Tony Shalhoub (Wings; Galaxy Quest) and Crip Camp’s Jim LeBrecht, Lowen and Cohrs’s documentary defies expectations in a multitude of ways, all of them in pursuit of normalizing the idea of life with a disability. Like any good murder mystery, Kids Like Me throws us straight into the action as a “dead body” is cast to the ground from a second-story window in the opening moments and a group of individuals moves around it before moving to create the homemade blood that will adorn the victim for the close-up. We’re not given names first, or a background in where we are, what’s going on, or any other means by which to know the situation (this all comes later), requiring the audience to use context clues to determine everything. This is wise as it not only forces the audience to pay closer attention, it establishes the notion that what we’re seeing is a family at play; a family whose dynamics are, for better or worse, constructed around Oliver. From here, the slice-of-life portion provides the audience as little as they need to ground themselves within the documentary – location, names, and relationships as they relate to Oliver (sibling, parent, aunt, friend, etc) – which contains its positives and negatives within the film as the whole. On the positive side, the approach centralizes Oliver’s perspective, enabling the audience to better understand his lived experience and how said experience touches/impacts others, primarily his younger sister, Willa. We are imbedded with the family for the duration, watching Oliver at school, at play, in transit, and at-work on his caper, each interaction telling far more than mere exposition or explanation from one of the talking head interviews would. The struggles that Oliver faces with temperament and impulsivity that are as much by-products of being an adolescent as of someone perceiving the differences in themselves. The desire, by Willa, to stand apart from her older brother, to be a singularity as opposed to a duality, is as much a regular part of self-determination any younger sibling faces growing up in a household where so much energy is poured into another sibling. The parents, who spend so much of their time going from job to child-related activity to child-related necessity face their own challenges as they, themselves, may be a little lost. It’s quite natural as a parent to feel as one might lose themselves a bit (who they were then compared to who they are now, both as individuals and as a couple). Understandably, we observe this as increased due to the additional mental and financial load of having a child with a disability. In these slice-of-life portions, Lowen and Cohrs never pass judgement through the lens or through editing of scenes; they give everything room to exist, allowing the complexities of life that occur in near every home find representation here. The main negative is that one doesn’t really know when the story takes place or the duration of the story outside of specific markers like holidays and educational events.
The other portion of the film that focuses on the creation and production of Oliver’s story is magical for a number of reasons. Similar to Alysa Nahmias’s documentary Cookie Queens (2026), this portion is about a community coming together to support a child’s interests. Because of the opening of Kids Like Me, we know that this family is already working together to make their version of stories, but nothing on the scale that Oliver envisions. In segues from the first portion, Lowen and Chors utilize high-production sequences that feel like moments plucked from Oliver’s imagination — him sitting at the keyboard working on dialogue one moment and sitting on a set the next, the cinematography fully changed from natural colors to a heightened tones to match a different reality, Oliver in costume, non-members of his immediate household appearing as characters — so that we, the viewing audience, feel transported into his vision. In a bit of that old movie magic, sometimes we see people before we meet who plays them, whether it’s his friends from school, a family friend, or a relative, introducing a sense of non-chronological fluidity that would make a normal film feel incongruous, whereas, here, one feels taken away by Oliver’s creativity. It’s also through this portion, interwoven into the first as it is, that learning about how this community showed up for the family and continues to do so impacts their daily lives. “It takes a village,” the saying goes, and it can make an incredible difference in whether one feels a part of something or separate from the whole for those lucky enough to have one, irrespective of familial circumstances. The showing up here come off as something we all long to have, much like friends and family rallying behind a child trying to make a cookie quota or attending a family member’s recital, and there is acknowledgement that it makes some loads lighter.
As these two portions converge, deviate, and converge again, Lowen and Cohrs present a family as embattled with trials as any other, just more specified given the considerations they need to make regarding Oliver: work-life balance, sibling rivalry, education, health care, and interpersonal harmony. In a period where members of the disability community are still shown as “special” or “heroic” for just existing or are viewed as less-than because they weren’t born or are no longer able-bodied, Kids Like Me demonstrates, among other things, that (a) accessibility means intentional living through consideration, not personal expectation, and (b) any family, regardless of abilities, is better off supported by their community. At some point, the shift away from showing up for our friends, neighbors, and family, the circling of wagons around one’s own life instead of looking to how we can help and get involved, just got lost. Instead of a community of “we,” it’s largely a community of “I.” Just like the very lively action of local giving groups in my area offer hope that myopic perception is weakening, Kids Like Me presents a possible society in which we do for others because it’s good and right, that giving something doesn’t mean giving up something else, that offering accommodations doesn’t mean taking from another, that being a kid is hard — Period. And being asked to grow up without a community is harder.
Screening during Tribeca Film Festival 2026.
For more information, head to the official Tribeca Film Festival Kids Like Me webpage.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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