“Rule Breakers” Rises Above Ordinary

Rule Breakers (Bill Guttentag, 2025) 3 out of 5 stars

Based on a true story—as an opening title card informs us—Rule Breakers, from director Bill Guttentag (Spyral), offers an inspiring story dressed up in rather conventional cinematic clothing. We’ve seen films about iconoclasts making a difference before; it’s almost a genre unto itself. But that doesn’t take away from the heartwarming aspects of the real-life tale.

In 2017, an Afghan woman named Roya Mahboob started an all-girl robotics team to compete in the annual FIRST Global Challenge. Though Afghanistan at that time was not yet back in the grip of the Taliban, this nevertheless proved a challenge in what was still a highly traditional country. Rule Breakers follows the ups and downs, triumphs and failures, and more, of the process and competitions.

Nikohl Boosheri (The Wedding) plays Mahboob with a mixture of starry-eyed wonder and sharp perseverance. She is aided in the task by her brother, Ali (Noorin Gulamgaus), and an American of Indian background, Samir (Ali Fazal, Death on the Nile), among others, though it is the recruits themselves who take up much of her attention. First she has to convince them, and then, more importantly, their families.

The movie initially cuts back and forth between the present of 2017 and beyond and Mahboob’s childhood and early adulthood, when at recurring intervals she is denied access to computers while always finding a way around those restrictions. She eventually establishes herself as an expert, which then leads her to want to open up opportunities for other Afghan girls. Through montage after montage (one of the movie’s weaknesses is an overreliance on this technique), Rule Breakers shows us Mahboob’s recruitment efforts before jumping to the competitions.

All of them take place on the international stage, which leads to great opportunities for the team and also pushback at home when photos and videos show the girls behaving in ways unbecoming of conservative young Muslim women. The actual goings-on at the many contests are hard to follow (another flaw of the film), but from what we can make out, the girls—known as the Afghan Dreamers—rise in the ranks each time until they start to medal. Will they one day win gold? Google it or just guess.

The actresses portraying the Dreamers—Amber Afzali, Nina Hosseinzadeh, Sara Malal Rowe, and Mariam Saraj—do good work, elevating what could be trite material to something significantly better. As they chafe under the yoke of expectations, they slowly blossom into confident beings able to own their achievements. Ending titles announce that their off-screen counterparts all now live abroad, away from the Taliban. Good news. And even if Rule Breakers struggles to break free from storytelling clichés, the source material is anything but ordinary.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.