For the Romanian gymnast Andreea Răducan, the loss of her Olympic gold medal in Sydney 2000 is still a trauma. Fifteen years later, she tries to understand, through the eyes of an adult, what has actually happened.

“The Golden Girl” digs into these systemic questions with diligence. Threaded throughout the film are her exchanges with a psychiatrist who, employing a sometimes bizarre combativeness, asks her to confront the long-term effects of the punishing training regimen (shown here in candid archival clips) that she and her peers underwent as pubescent girls. When she fondly remembers being showered with plastic medals in a televised ceremony upon her return to Romania, he considers the damage that such inflated nationalistic glory could do to a disoriented teenager. Deftly, the film shifts focus from Raducan’s disqualification to the entrenched injustices of Olympic sports, with their outsized pressures and brittle illusions of meritocracy. (New York Times)