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In Miami, a winding road trip of a slow-burning crime thriller, the exotic-dance gyrations of half-sisters Anna and Angela have a silly, sexy charm. It’s the offstage dance between them, and the shifting interplay of affection, admiration, distrust and resentment, that fuels this absorbing journey through genre territory.

With exceptional lead performances by Finnish star Krista Kosonen and Sonja Kuittinen, in her first film role, Zaida Bergroth’s third feature (after Last Cowboy Standing and The Good Son) is a compelling double character study. Though its central section could be tighter and its final stretch presents an overload of incident, the...

A heady mix of crime caper, neon dazzle, and American-ized dreams, all topped with a generous nod to movies like “Magic Mike” and “Showgirls,” Zaida Bergroth’s ambitious “Miami” appears to be taking the “stripper movie” into an entirely new direction. The filmmaker’s third feature — following festival favorites “The Good Son” and “The Last Cowboy Standing” — turns her keen eye for fraught familial relationships to something new: sisters.

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“Miami” follows the glamorous Angela (Krista Kosonen), who arrives in a tiny Finnish town armed with her exotic dancer pals and her dazzling personality, only to get mixed up with some bad dudes after the show is over (one gets the sense that Angela is always just one big scrape away from disaster). Angela hightails it out of town, armed with a brand-new sidekick: her shy...