The Telegraph by Tim Robey

As a writer, Kaurismäki has a precious knack for jokes that work beautifully in any language.

The Film Stage by Rory O'Connor

Hope is as contemporary and vital a film as you’re likely to find in 2017, but it’s also one of the funniest and most classically (not to mention beautifully) cinematic too.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by John Semley

It's a rare feat for a director whose films, from their muted humour and dated-seeming mise-en-scène, to their use of flat, unexpressive, Bressonian close-ups of characters, have always seemed weirdly outside of time.

The Playlist by Jessica Kiang

Somehow one of the effects of our current state of topsy-turviness has been to bring us closer into alignment with Kaurisma?ki’s skewed vision; if his movies are all, in their way, like pictures hanging crooked on a wall, with The Other Side of Hope we don’t have to tilt our heads anymore: the whole house has moved around us.

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

Winsome, sweet, and often very funny, The Other Side of Hope is more of the same from Kaurismäki, and thank God for that.

Screen Daily by Dan Fainaru

As economical in his visual style as he is with his dialogue, Kaurismaki makes the most out of having his actors do the least.

Screen International by Dan Fainaru

As economical in his visual style as he is with his dialogue, Kaurismaki makes the most out of having his actors do the least.

The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney

While the film depicts a world seldom far removed from grim reality, the sly strain of humor keeps it buoyant, nowhere more so than in Kaurismaki’s deadpan dialogue, delivered with affectless aplomb by his marvelous cast.

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

The deadpan style of the acting functions as a vaccine against sentimentality, but there is no doubting the sincerity of this movie’s motives or the effectiveness of its methods.

Village Voice by Kristen Yoonsoo Kim

For all the deadpan comedy and eccentric characterization, Kaurismäki anchors the film in Khaled’s story and his immigration anxieties, all depicted with quiet humanity that never feels exaggerated. It’s a beautiful companion piece to Le Havre, and a film that will gently warm your cold, cynical heart.

New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein

The Other Side of Hope — which is tragic, funny, depressing, and inspiring — shows that a truly imaginative artist has resources unavailable to journalists and nonfiction filmmakers. In Kaurismaki’s work, it’s as if the masks of comedy and tragedy don’t — as usual — face away from each other, but stare each other in the face, as if they were saying, “You and me, we’re in this together.”

Time Out London by Dave Calhoun

It’s a deeply humane film, as well as a quietly hilarious one.

The Guardian

There aren’t really any surprises in The Other Side of Hope; it’s more like witnessing the ongoing cultivation of a humane philosophy. But the film is devilishly funny, economically constructed (the demise of Wikström’s marriage is shown in wordless images) and decked out in the director’s dismal palette of cobalt blue, moss green and burnt-marmalade orange.

CineVue by Patrick Gamble

Using comedy to chase away the despair of modern life, The Other Side of Hope is a thoroughly satisfying and distinctively lovable film.

Variety by Owen Gleiberman

As long as Kaurismäki presents this tidy a vision (aesthetically and morally), he’ll continue to be an engagingly hermetic art-house curio impersonating an artist.