Movie Nation by Roger Moore

Every action in this Cannes award-winner is motivated if not wholly rational. Every consequence grimly believable and shorn of artifice and melodrama.

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

Fringed with an even greater degree of futility than any of the duo’s previous work, Tori and Lokita doesn’t harbor any delusions that shining a harsh light on such awful stories will ever be enough to make the world a better place, and yet — in the least uncertain terms imaginable — it leaves us with an indelible glimpse into the darkness that surrounds them.

Los Angeles Times by Justin Chang

I think that the filmmakers’ pessimism is inseparable from their compassion and that their compassion is inseparable from their rage.

Variety by Owen Gleiberman

Working in their rigorously lyrical drama-as-documentary style, the Dardennes place the audience on the hamster wheel of Tori and Lokita’s lives, in a way that’s both harrowing and immersive.

Screen Daily by Jonathan Romney

Moving, politically committed and with an absolute ring of hard-researched reality, this is at the very least their finest since 2011’s The Kid With The Bike, and arguably one of their very best.

The Daily Beast by Nick Schager

The film’s placid aesthetics help the directors strip away any artificial barriers between the audience and their subjects, thereby eliciting immense, compassionate engagement with Tori and Lokita’s plight.

The New York Times by Manohla Dargis

The precarity of the lives that the Dardennes explore give the stories feeling and tension while their directorial choices — including where they put the camera and how they situate characters in the world — give their work its characteristic ethical politics.

The Associated Press by Jake Coyle

In the bleak, everyday struggles the Dardennes dramatize, they are always, thank god, keenly on the lookout for grace.

RogerEbert.com by Matt Zoller Seitz

The lead performances are extraordinary. They're real-seeming, in the manner of so many gifted but relatively inexperienced performers who haven't yet had the spontaneity crushed out of them by the cliches of formal training.

The Hollywood Reporter by Leslie Felperin

This may be the Dardennes’ most emotionally engaging film in a while — a tragedy told with utter clarity, centered on protagonists entirely deserving of our sympathy, empathy, all the ‘pathies you’ve got.

The Film Stage by David Katz

Tori and Lokita initially feels like something special as it breathlessly moves through the story, drawing you in utmost empathy towards the characters who are so bravely trying to claw themselves to dignity. But there’s this residue you can’t escape, of just how written and jerry-rigged it all seems: how the filmmaking has sacrificed that vital sense of plausibility just to keep the plates of story spinning, and the catharsis on the verge of spiking.

Time Out by Phil de Semlyen

For those masters of small-scale vérité social dramas, it’s such a bracing sensation to see them tiptoeing into genre terrain, you’ll forgive the fact that the villains are two-dimensional and that the ending is jarringly abrupt.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

There is a simplicity and clarity of purpose here that I responded to and the Dardennes have got excellent performances from their young leads.

The Playlist by Iana Murray

Tori and Lokita puts its characters through hell to elicit some tears and send an urgent message. You may consider this an empathetic film — exploitative might be the better word.

CineVue by John Bleasdale

The final twist is so manipulative and cynical as to be actually enraging.