A soul-crushing weight rests upon Lorna (Dobroshi), the Albanian-immigrant heroine of the Dardenne brothers' stunning proletarian character study.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 17, 2011

Lorna's Silence echoes long after the movie ends.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 11, 2009

As filmmakers, the Dardennes are more concerned with probing the causes of crime than in glamorizing it.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 3, 2009

In casting the previously unknown Dobroshi, the brothers approach greatness with their lean portrait of simple humanity tested by desire and driven desperate by circumstances.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 28, 2009

The story within Lorna's Silence is built on tiny increments of tantalizing details, meted out in penurious droplets and with chest-tightening tension that suggests that what the brothers wanted to be when they grew up were boa constrictors.

Full Review | Aug 28, 2009

The Dardennes are masters of their brand of realist cinema. Over the years, the brothers' move from documentaries to narrative features has been handsomely rewarded.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 28, 2009

Dobroshi, a dark-browed beauty, has an arresting stillness - never smiling (except for one brief, unguarded moment with Sokol), never letting down her guard. It's a slice of a life nobody would want, and a portrait that's not easy to forget.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 27, 2009

Don't look for milk and kindness in the cinematic world of the Dardennes brothers.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 27, 2009

Offers a damning critique of global capitalism as it works its way down to the street and poisons the most intimate human encounters.

| Aug 20, 2009

The Dardennes' film offers a portrait of a fragile yet determined woman set on making a home for herself in the world, even as that world unravels before her eyes.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 14, 2009

It's a very good film nevertheless, and in Dobroshi it has a face that passes through every conceivable shade of sorrow.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 13, 2009

What power is here. What affecting acting by Dobroshi, Renier and Marinne.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 13, 2009

It leaves the audience with neither a sense of uplift nor devastation, but, rather, with something more akin to intellectual appreciation.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 7, 2009

That's as much as you should know before going into Lorna's Silence, which combines Bressonian aesthetic rigor with Hitchcockian suspense.

| Jul 31, 2009

The always reliable Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, the Belgian poets of the underclass, outdo themselves in Lorna's Silence.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 31, 2009

Lorna's Silence is a gritty, deceptively low-key, no-fuss, no-frills movie of consistent originality and surprise in which suspense arises straight up from the heroine's evolving character.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 31, 2009

Lorna's Silence, with a narrative that turns partly on a mysterious pregnancy, evokes, subtly but unmistakably, a range of maternal biblical associations.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 31, 2009

Like earlier Dardenne films, Lorna's Silence is naturalistic, yet this one, beautifully shot in 35 mm film by Alain Marcoen, achieves a poetry of bereftness.

| Jul 31, 2009

Lorna's Silence feels like a refinement, even a repetition, of earlier themes. But the brothers are repeating themselves at such a high level that the redundancies are more than welcome.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 30, 2009

If the Dardennes strip sentimentality from poverty, they also tend to strip subjects of their voices.

| Jul 30, 2009