Four Daughters is a story about a family torn apart by religious extremism and institutional misogyny. It's also about our inability to control the lives of those around us, even if it means losing them forever.

| Aug 1, 2024

We see the power in tying together the fake and the real — the moment when method acting turns into method remembering.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 14, 2024

It's a kind of heartbreaking story of families being torn apart by hard-line religious dogma.

| Mar 6, 2024

Admittedly during rehearsals some deeper biographical insights are gleaned, but they come at a cost to the film’s narrative and intellectual clarity.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 1, 2024

[Kaouther Ben Hania's] technique could have made for purely formal game-playing: instead, the artifice casts a sharp magnifying gaze on real family agony and, against the odds, occasional joy.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 1, 2024

Four Daughters blends truth and fiction with rare transparency, and does it for a purpose. You won't see another film quite like it this year, or really any year.

| Feb 29, 2024

It frequently leaves us wondering how much of what we’re seeing is actual family history and how much of it is a manipulated or exaggerated version. The film is never less than riveting, wherever the truth lies.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 29, 2024

A movie about the trauma of reliving these stories that is ultimately about the warmth and healing these narrators find in each other.

| Jan 26, 2024

A thoroughly bold, frequently brave and occasionally quite funny experiment that threatens, but never manages, to go completely off the rails.

| Jan 25, 2024

In telling the story of Olfa and her daughters, Ben Hania is also telling the tumultuous story of Tunisia in the wake of the Arab Spring, a promising movement that began in that country before spreading to the rest of North Africa and the Middle East.

| Dec 9, 2023

I love this movie, and it might land on my Top Ten list at the end of the year. It is just extraordinary.

| Nov 29, 2023

Arab voices in Western cinemas are all too rare, and “Four Daughters” is one of the best films of the year...

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 9, 2023

This is a heartbreaker about mothers and daughters, the cruelty of repression and the slippery but revealing nature of performance.

| Nov 3, 2023

"Four Daughters” is a triumph of layered storytelling.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 27, 2023

Despite the documentary’s exciting hybridity, the conceit is more interesting in theory than it is in practice.

| Oct 26, 2023

The real-life subjects, taking the lead in the restagings, deliver a revelatory, poignant blend of drama, memory, and self-scrutiny.

| Oct 25, 2023

A fascinating metacommentary courses beneath the film’s emotional storytelling surface.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 23, 2023

... A haunting documentary with the uncomfortable intimacy of group therapy.

| Oct 4, 2023

Far from a gamble made in the service of naturalism, this heightened and strange piece of fiction re-enactment exposes itself for critique in a way that you almost have to respect. For its sins, it seems to -- just about -- succeed.

| Original Score: B | May 25, 2023

Like a kind of cinematic Lego set, Ben Hania takes the building blocks of filmmaking and constructs from them something cathartic, affecting and original.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 25, 2023