96% The Kid with a Bike

All Critics (102) | Top Critics (26) | Fresh (98) | Rotten (4)

The film should be required viewing for everyone who has lost faith in the power of random acts of kindness.

"The Kid With a Bike" vibrates with desperation, frustration and the simple unfairness of life, leavened with glimpses of hope.

Cyril is one of the most inspiringly resilient, self-aware young characters to arrive on-screen in recent memory...

"The Kid With A Bike'' is, remarkably, about hope - about the connections people forge when the ones they've been given desert them.

The Dardennes' quiet, naturalistic style strips this story of melodrama but not of emotion.

Without diminishing the boy's intensity or making him in any way ingratiating, the Dardennes take us into his mind, and we begin to appreciate not only his predicament but his resiliency.

Unlike many films, it genuinely earns every feeling it evokes.

a complex interweaving of bitter reality and a deeply humane worldview that sees the possibility of redemption in even the cruelest of circumstances

A beautiful and stirring story of unconditional compassion, of emotional honesty, and -- above all -- of hope.

The Dardennes' style resists cheap sentimentality, yet in The Kid with a Bike it yields a deeply moving examination of love as a shield.

Dardenne brothers set an orphan in search of a father

Will bad breaks break a boy?

How the Dardennes, time and again, turn gritty, mundane subjects into transcendent moments of honesty and truth is one of the great cinematic wonders.

This is a film that's not always easy to watch, but just about impossible to forget.

It is crystal clear on at least one point: People are mysterious and beautiful, and they need each other.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne offer another in their remarkable succession of contemporary neo-realist dramas in this quietly devastating but gently hopeful [film].

[It] gives obvious homage to a variety of films. ... But one inspiration shines throughout the movie ... The Red Balloon.

...the film delivers a final act as riveting as it is artistically satisfying. Not many films can claim a perfect ending. This one can.

...manages to balance a spiritual sense of grace with the earthy eye of a here-and-now realist.

Hunched over the handlebars, the boy's body seems to carve a hole in the wind. And we watch as this unhappy, rejected child makes some terrible choices, some of which make us want to look away.

One of the classic international works about juvenile delinquency.

If the film doesn't sizzle as heatedly as the Dardennes' more celebrated works, it's nevertheless infused with the compassion and care that they seem always to bring to bear on any subject.

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