Fyzal Boulifa swaps British suburbia for the streets of Morocco in his rich but surprisingly tepid sophomore feature, The Damned Don’t Cry.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 13, 2024

Tebbae and El Hajjouji are both compelling, and the film's sweetest moments effectively work in contrast with the unjust, casual callousness of the pair's world.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 21, 2023

This melodrama from British-Moroccan filmmaker Fyzal Boulifa spells out the hard facts of poverty in North Africa and how passively the shackles are transferred from one generation to the next.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 13, 2023

It's the kind of film in which the audience must work to discover deeper truths about the events depicted. The premise feels bracingly realistic, impossible to predict as it cycles through events that are hopeful and darkly troubling.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 11, 2023

It’s beautifully paced, outstandingly fresh and original.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 11, 2023

An intense simmering of emotion, underscored by Selim and Fatima-Zahra’s unbearable emotional and material precarity.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 10, 2023

An emotive portrait of a mother and son, this is a tragic slice of social realism centred around a pair of superbly compound characters.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 9, 2023

There’s a fable-like quality to a story in which the best intentions of both characters somehow produce the worst outcomes for each.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 7, 2023

Bitter emotions bring the drama to life, and Boulifa presents it in rich images.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 6, 2023

Cruelties flow beneath: class, colonialism and the self-delusion of men with power that they are being kind when actually protecting their own interests.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 6, 2023

Life in The Damned Don’t Cry is brutally unfair, and Boulifa offers no easy answers. But thanks to the compassionate filmmaker and his two impressive leads, it’s a compelling watch.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 6, 2023

Boulifa has constructed a film that knows its subjects, but isn’t sure what it wants us, the audience, to take away.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 6, 2023

A deeply sympathetic dual portrait powered by arresting performances.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 4, 2023

Dazzling Moroccan drama of a fragile but unbreakable bond between an impoverished, downtrodden Arab widowed mother and her unappreciative 16-year-old son.

| Original Score: A | Oct 12, 2022

The Damned Don't Cry is an intrepid exploration of the mystery that is the Arab mother-son bond. Selim and Fatima-Zahra have a co-dependent relationship typified by years of unshakable resentment and disappointment towards one another.

| Oct 6, 2022

This haunting, peculiar and often expressly queer story of social isolation and outsider survival feels like Boulifa’s own moving, idiosyncratic way of threading the components of his cultural identity.

| Sep 17, 2022

The Damned Don’t Cry is excellent, asking tough questions about society and morality without easy answers or neat conclusions.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 8, 2022

It's a sorrowful film about surviving in a world more interested in failure than success for the nonconforming, but it's also filled with a respect and grace for characters stubbornly choosing the road less traveled.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 8, 2022

The fully lived-in performances from the impressive non-professional leads brings the film a fierce, thorny authenticity.

| Sep 8, 2022

It is humane, richly involving and powerfully acted by two headliners making their screen debut.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 8, 2022