The film left me completely devastated and Oksana Akinshina’s performance is absolutely heartbreaking....“Lilya 4-ever” was so powerful it helped reshape laws within society. This is as important and urgent as cinema gets.

| Nov 20, 2023

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.

| Dec 7, 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.

| Jan 10, 2018

Lilya 4-Ever gives us a glorious, heart-wrenching debut performance in the lead, as auspicious as any in the history of cinema."

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 17, 2010

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.

| Original Score: A | Dec 17, 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.

Full Review | Feb 26, 2009

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 30, 2006

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 6, 2005

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 16, 2005

It is undeniable that Moodysson's work has a raw emotional power that transcends most of the film's flaws.

| Feb 24, 2005

You'll see superb acting by two teens.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 14, 2003

Absorbing without being particularly illuminating.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 11, 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

| Sep 16, 2003

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 2, 2003

[Moodysson] dives into the soul of a 16-year-old Estonian girl and tears you apart.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 25, 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.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 22, 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.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 6, 2003

A wrenching feel-bad movie graced by a luminous central performance.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jun 27, 2003

It's Moodysson's dark sense of humour to make [Lilya's] heaven the hell of merely poverty and insurmountable ennui.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 25, 2003

Goes too far in depicting the humiliation and cruelty heaped on Lilja

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 25, 2003