All Critics (110)
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Top Critics (29)
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Fresh (107)
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Rotten (4)
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DVD (1)
There is not a wasted shot in this stripped down, pared back fable. Yet, it accrues a deep and lasting power. You won't see many better this year.
The film should be required viewing for everyone who has lost faith in the power of random acts of kindness.
"The Kid With a Bike" vibrates with desperation, frustration and the simple unfairness of life, leavened with glimpses of hope.
Cyril is one of the most inspiringly resilient, self-aware young characters to arrive on-screen in recent memory...
Hunched over the handlebars, the boy's body seems to carve a hole in the wind. And we watch as this unhappy, rejected child makes some terrible choices, some of which make us want to look away.
"The Kid With A Bike'' is, remarkably, about hope - about the connections people forge when the ones they've been given desert them.
The Kid with a Bike, now deservedly inducted into the Criterion Collection, reconfirms Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's reputation as masters of the modern class drama.
Downbeat but powerful drama about childhood and love.
It's nonetheless immensely satisfying - not least in its commitment to a child protagonist whose near-feral intensity and unthinking ingratitude make him the polar opposite of cute.
It's a powerful, well-crafted film and a striking depiction of a side of growing up few filmmakers have tried to put on film. Fewer still have captured it with this sort of honesty and emotional gravity.
[Thrusts] adults into the psychology of a child, pushing them into a confrontation with their own self-involvement.
The Dardennes smoothly shift one gear up in the film's coda, offering a sting of humility before a flash of quiet grace. Then we're left watching after one boy on his bike, stubbornly moving, moving, moving, a force to be reckoned with and respected.
A frank, no-nonsense drama filled with compassion for a lost soul kid abandoned by his father.
...a deeply humane movie that deserves to be compared with one of its obvious inspirations, Vittorio De Sica's neo-realist classic Bicycle Thieves
A moving, sweet and at times harrowing tale...
De France does a terrific job of balancing maternal instinct with matter-of-factness, in a performance that is more human than tender - and all the more powerful for it.
Unlike many films, it genuinely earns every feeling it evokes.
a complex interweaving of bitter reality and a deeply humane worldview that sees the possibility of redemption in even the cruelest of circumstances
A beautiful and stirring story of unconditional compassion, of emotional honesty, and -- above all -- of hope.
The Dardennes' style resists cheap sentimentality, yet in The Kid with a Bike it yields a deeply moving examination of love as a shield.
Dardenne brothers set an orphan in search of a father
Will bad breaks break a boy?
How the Dardennes, time and again, turn gritty, mundane subjects into transcendent moments of honesty and truth is one of the great cinematic wonders.
This is a film that's not always easy to watch, but just about impossible to forget.
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