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London River

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United Kingdom, France, Algeria · 2009
1h 24m
Director Rachid Bouchareb
Starring Brenda Blethyn, Sotigui Kouyaté, Sami Bouajila, Roschdy Zem
Genre Drama, Mystery

After traveling to London to check on their missing children in the wake of the 2005 London terror attacks on the city, two strangers come to discover their respective children had been living together at the time of the attacks. A beautifully photographed and acted film that packs hard punches of emotional truth.

Stream London River

What are people saying?

What are critics saying?

70

Village Voice by

Director Rachid Bouchareb brings a measured hand to this intimate, occasionally overdetermined sketch of the aloneness at the center of our global confluence.

75

Slant Magazine by Andrew Schenker

Rachid Bouchareb casts his account of the horrifying aftermath of tragedy on an intimate scale, allowing the halting words and frightened faces of his two leads to tell us as much as we need to know about the uncertainties of those faced with tracking down their lost loved ones.

80

Time Out by David Fear

It's a credit to both the actors and Franco-Algerian filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb (Days of Glory) that the film never dives headfirst into mawkishness.

60

New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman

The script, co-written by Bouchareb, is regrettably simplistic. But Blethyn and Kouyaté inhabit and expand the film's earnestly instructive intentions, leaving us with a deeply-felt experience rather than a naively-sketched lesson.

67

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

Can actors save a mediocre movie? In London River, they come close. Blethyn's frantic, sad naivete creates a fascinating contrast to Kouyaté's understated performance.

80

Los Angeles Times by Gary Goldstein

Blethyn brings tremendous empathy to the introspective, determined Elisabeth, while the tall, gaunt and dreadlocked Ousmane fleshes out his less-dimensional role with a haunting sadness that speaks volumes.

75

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Rick Groen

Here, in orderly fiction, the reverberations bring about the alignment of cultures, the meeting of minds and the comforting assertion that "our lives aren't that different." Maybe so, and the film deserves full marks for trying, at times movingly, to convince us. In the end, the argument is a little too neat to accept, but far too poignant to ignore.

60

The New York Times by Stephen Holden

Rachid Bouchareb's tidy little two-character film, London River, demonstrates how great acting can infuse a banal, politically correct drama with dollops of emotional truth.

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