Lilja 4-ever Reviews
December 7, 2018
After making such a brilliant splash with his first two films -- Show Me Love and Together -- the Swedish director Lukas Moodysson seems to dry up in Lilya 4-ever.
January 10, 2018
The social questions it raises are real enough; its sentimentality is what makes one doubt Moodysson is Ingmar Bergman's heir. Not by a long sob.
August 17, 2010
Lilya 4-Ever gives us a glorious, heart-wrenching debut performance in the lead, as auspicious as any in the history of cinema."
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
December 17, 2009
A harsh dramatic brew, Lilya 4-Ever is a monumental, abrasive document of a young life flushed down the drain; it's an exceptional, deafening humanitarian alarm that will continue to overwhelm and outrage for years to come.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
February 26, 2009
So seamless and relentlessly powerful that the social-realism of not just this film, but the genre itself, is pushed to its limit. Acting and action that rips so deeply, you'll feel you've got to do more than simply watch.
December 30, 2006
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
December 6, 2005
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
July 16, 2005
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
February 24, 2005
It is undeniable that Moodysson's work has a raw emotional power that transcends most of the film's flaws.
November 14, 2003
You'll see superb acting by two teens.
Original Score: 3.5/4
November 11, 2003
Absorbing without being particularly illuminating.
Original Score: 2.5/4
September 16, 2003
The film cuts like a knife as a critique of a disordered planet, with ever more twisted notions of consumerism and flesh as commodity
August 2, 2003
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
July 25, 2003
[Moodysson] dives into the soul of a 16-year-old Estonian girl and tears you apart.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
July 22, 2003
Why pay eight bucks to see this horrifying and sad film about the sort of girl you'd pass on the street without giving her a thought? Because, improbably, it says that life is worth living.
Original Score: 3.5/4
July 6, 2003
Maybe the movie sounds like a drab and worthy slog through misery, but it's alive, it feels true, and it got to me.
Original Score: 3.5/4
June 27, 2003
A wrenching feel-bad movie graced by a luminous central performance.
Original Score: B
June 25, 2003
It's Moodysson's dark sense of humour to make [Lilya's] heaven the hell of merely poverty and insurmountable ennui.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
June 25, 2003
Goes too far in depicting the humiliation and cruelty heaped on Lilja
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
June 20, 2003
It tells a heartbreaking story, one of those tales that need to be told and about which only pain can be felt.
Original Score: B