The heightened imagination makes this environment feel detailed in a textured way, especially when one sees glimpses of the vivid story being told.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 5, 2022

Almost mythical in its telling, Night of The Kings feels unlike anything in cinemas at the moment. Sidestepping the conventions of modern cinema, it's a tense 90 minutes that throws you out at the end, taken aback by what you've just witnessed.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 3, 2022

A prison drama like you have never seen, more interested in the act of telling stories than in the stories that take place inside the prison.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 7, 2021

It's hard to take your eyes off the screen. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 21, 2021

Much like this movie's imaginative protagonist, you may find yourself hanging in there, taking it all in, trying not to get wiped out and hoping you'll live to see another day.

| Sep 9, 2021

It does this all while engaging in the meaning, expectation, responsibility, and duty of telling of 'your' story not just as a man but as a nation.

| Original Score: 76/100 | Aug 19, 2021

Night of the Kings captures the poetics of dance, of movement, of storytelling that goes beyond the traditional oral delivery.

| Aug 7, 2021

Fails its own test. Excessive duration is the whole thing, yet Night of the Kings is barely sketched out, much less spilling over.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Aug 6, 2021

The film may be hard to follow -- CGI elephants stampeding in one minute, IRL news footage appearing the next -- but it's gloriously inventive too. Now, have you heard the one about the Ivorian prison?

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 28, 2021

At its best, the movie is highly impressive: a heady mixture of prison thriller and theatrical performance.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 25, 2021

Its vivid, genre-fluid investigation of the alchemical art of storytelling definitely hits the mark.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 25, 2021

he film's various shout-outs to the kinetic City of God only reinforce how stilted this is by comparison.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 23, 2021

It asks a lot from the viewer, but pays them back two-fold

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 21, 2021

Mostly it plays like a dream - menacing, surreal, hard to shake even in daylight.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 21, 2021

The freshness of the approach, combined with the substance of the stories, works the same strange magic on the viewer as on the inmates. It is easy to be swept along.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 20, 2021

It's an exhilarating mix of the gritty and the otherworldly, making for a film that's both powerful and vastly entertaining.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 17, 2021

Night of the Kings intriguingly - and not ineffectively - infuses sociopolitical reality into a canvas of magical fantasy.

| Jun 6, 2021

Night of the Kings is a film made of fleeting moments of beauty packed within a world defined by violence and surrounded by death.

| Apr 30, 2021

An exuberant performance presided over by... a versatile Bakary Koné. [Full review in Spanish]

| Apr 15, 2021

Even as the ground shifts under us, Night of the Kings remains compelling.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Apr 7, 2021