Lafosse explores the psychological and political truth beneath the tabloid clichés in a spare but furious attack on patriarchal authority. As tragedy, Our Children is both classical and contemporary.

| Aug 27, 2019

It's well performed and unflinchingly disturbing, raising bold questions about patriarchy, parenting and mental health.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 5, 2017

It's an interesting way to tell a story and a devastating journey, particularly since it's based on a real-life incident.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 19, 2013

This is a taut psychological study, based on a true story, of the complexities of personal power relationships that begins with the kind of shattering revelation that would be the conclusion of most films.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 8, 2013

There is no whodunit here -- the horror is plain in the opening shots -- and the how is presented with great restraint, but the why remains veiled and mysterious long after the film has ended.

| Aug 5, 2013

The audience is held in a vise of claustrophobia, and every room seems full of tiny, screaming children.

| Aug 2, 2013

Lafosse's of the material has the feel of a psychological crime scene investigation.

| Original Score: A- | Aug 2, 2013

Our Children was inspired by a real-life Belgian tragedy, but director Joachim LaFosse has built that news item into his own micro-portrait of coercion dipped in kindness.

| Aug 2, 2013

At once beautifully realized and brutally uncompromising ...

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 1, 2013

In terms of both plot and style (a string of one-face-then-another handheld shots), Our Children stakes everything on performance.

| Original Score: B | Aug 1, 2013

Aware that a story of such grave human weight and consequence demands to be told exactingly if it is to be told at all, Lafosse's film succeeds most profoundly by refusing to phrase the inevitable question -- how could she? -- as a rhetorical one.

| Original Score: A- | Jul 31, 2013

This is film-making of a very high order.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 31, 2013

Our Children isn't simply a story of a mother with post-natal depression. It's much more oblique, and, like any family, complicated than that.

Full Review | Jul 31, 2013

Belgian director Joachim Lafosse paints an image of how domestic bliss turned untenable builds to a crime unforgivable in Our Children.

| Jul 31, 2013

Masterfully plays with stylistic conventions and all-too-common instances of real-life matricide ...

| Jul 30, 2013

It's a near-perfect portrait of a domestic tragedy as a master-and-servant psychodrama, one that leaves catastrophic collateral damage in its wake.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 30, 2013

Suffice to say that pathos is intertwined with pathology in Lafosse's fifth feature, inspired by a true story-but Murielle's decline isn't any less full of tough home truths.

| Jul 1, 2013

Those of us who are forever citing Nicole Kidman's tear-stained close-up in Birth as the ultimate example of wordless acting will now have to update our reference points.

| Jun 3, 2013

A small masterpiece.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 10, 2013

Dequenne is simply one of best actors on the planet. Her portrayal of baby blues and postnatal psychosis is as subtle as it is devastating.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 10, 2013