Tori and Lokita
Diaphana Films | Release Date: March 24, 2023 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
78
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 20 Critic Reviews
Positive:
15
Mixed:
4
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Movie NationRoger MooreJul 15, 2023
Every action in this Cannes award-winner is motivated if not wholly rational. Every consequence grimly believable and shorn of artifice and melodrama. Read full review
91
IndieWireDavid EhrlichMay 30, 2022
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. Read full review
90
The New York TimesManohla DargisMar 23, 2023
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. Read full review
90
The Daily BeastNick SchagerMar 23, 2023
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. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangMay 28, 2022
I think that the filmmakers’ pessimism is inseparable from their compassion and that their compassion is inseparable from their rage. Read full review
90
VarietyOwen GleibermanMay 28, 2022
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. Read full review
90
Screen DailyJonathan RomneyMay 26, 2022
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. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzMar 24, 2023
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. Read full review
88
The Associated PressJake CoyleMar 22, 2023
In the bleak, everyday struggles the Dardennes dramatize, they are always, thank god, keenly on the lookout for grace. Read full review
80
Little White LiesPhil ConcannonDec 10, 2022
Nobody does tension quite like the Dardenne brothers. As in so many of their films, there’s a moment in Tori and Lokita when a character makes a fateful decision and the narrative suddenly snaps into focus, creating stretches of the drama when you’re holding your breath and feeling a roiling sense of anxiety in the pit of your stomach. Read full review
80
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeDec 2, 2022
The latest film from the Dardenne brothers, a heart-rending tale of misused immigrants in contemporary Belgium, arrives just two weeks after Frank Berry’s Aisha pondered similar misfortunes in Ireland. Both are roughly in the social-realist mode, but the tone and the perspectives are quite different. Read full review
80
EmpireDavid ParkinsonNov 29, 2022
Meticulously controlled, but simmering with a tension that is suffused with fury, this treatise on dignity and depravity, aspiration and apathy is the Dardennes at their most accusatory and damning. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterLeslie FelperinMay 26, 2022
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. Read full review
75
The Film StageDavid KatzJun 3, 2022
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. Read full review
70
New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriMar 24, 2023
Tori and Lokita is a film born of rage and frustration, and as such, it’s a moving one. But it’s fair to expect more than just rage from artists — especially our greatest and most empathetic ones. Read full review
60
Time OutPhil de SemlyenMay 27, 2022
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. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 26, 2022
There is a simplicity and clarity of purpose here that I responded to and the Dardennes have got excellent performances from their young leads. Read full review
58
The PlaylistIana MurrayMay 26, 2022
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. Read full review
40
CineVueJohn BleasdaleMay 26, 2022
The final twist is so manipulative and cynical as to be actually enraging. Read full review
38
Slant MagazineJake ColeMar 23, 2023
The film subjects its main characters to one indignity after another, and to such a suffocating degree that it crosses the line between representation and exploitation. Read full review
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