RogerEbert.com by Robert Daniels

With Night of the Kings Lacôte collapses the bounds between eras, and dissolves myth and reality, performance and remembrance, into one whole. It’s an assured, energetic piece of epic filmmaking, one that celebrates how storytelling, oration, and folklore teach us about our past so we might change our present.

Chicago Tribune by Katie Walsh

What happens in Night of the Kings is a piece of traditional oration and impermanent art, significantly marked by both its temporal and improvisational qualities. It’s both a power struggle and a ritual practiced by the collective within a microcosm of society housed under the oppression of the state, and a powerful demonstration of the transporting, and liberating, power of narrative.

Polygon by Karen Han

Night of the Kings occasionally strays too far into fantasy (and CGI), even though the more grounded scenes are what truly make the film sing. Still, it’s a stunning work. Lacôte’s tribute to the power of stories is a powerful story in and of itself, celebrating oral traditions and the rituals we create for ourselves in order to make life just a little more bearable.

Variety by Peter Debruge

With this project, in which magical realism lends everything a mystical dimension, Lacôte confidently delivers on the promise of his 2014 Cannes-selected “Run.”

The Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij

This captivating hybrid of a movie mixes fairy-tale and storytelling elements with a vividly drawn backdrop of heightened realism — no one would mistake this prison for a luxury resort — and relies on images and sounds as much as the human voice to tell its multiple stories.

Boston Globe by Ty Burr

A tribute to the power of imagination and storytelling, and it’s like nothing you’ve seen before.

Paste Magazine by Andrew Crump

Night of Kings aesthetic dissonance is discombobulating, but the discombobulation is surprisingly pleasing in its headiness, as Lacôte plays with naturalist filmmaking and spectacle right out of The Lord of the Rings, intertwining the two so much that they are, at the end, inseparable from one another.

Consequence by Valerie Complex

Storytelling is an essential part of the human experience: How would we know the past and create futures without it? That conceit is the heart and power of Night of the Kings.

The A.V. Club by Beatrice Loayza

Lacôte’s got a lot on his mind, and despite a few missteps, his ambition pays off.

Screen Daily by Lee Marshall

This is an atmospherically shot film about African oral culture, about riots, street musicians and storytellers. But it also uses the space and denizens of the prison as a metaphor for the divisions and tensions within Ivorian society.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Barry Hertz

City of God crossed with A Prophet by way of One Thousand and One Nights, Philippe Lacôte’s Night of the Kings is an ambitious thriller that constantly surprises.

IndieWire by Ryan Lattanzio

While the film, both written and directed by Lacôte, is grounded in oral traditions that may seem exotic to certain viewers, the movie is really about the universal power of storytelling regardless of tongue — and how it can be used as a way to survive.

The Film Stage by Jared Mobarak

The film most likely work better for those with knowledge of the Ivory Coast and its tumultuous twenty-first century history, but that doesn’t mean those like me who are ignorant to that strife outside of what Lacôte and Roman provide can’t still enjoy the magic on display.

Slant Magazine by Jake Cole

The film is a celebration of oral traditions as a means of giving purpose to even the most hopeless of lives.

The New York Times by Nicolas Rapold

Lacôte crosses the open-ended energy of griot traditions with the surging tensions of the prison’s close quarters.