1 Tori and Lokita
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have always written and directed urgent dramas about social injustice, but Tori and Lokita is “the angriest movie the Dardenne brothers have ever made”, says David Ehrlich at IndieWire. The film’s teenage heroes, played by Pablo Schils and Joely Mbundu, are African immigrants who live in a shelter in Belgium. They’re battling to avoid being deported, and they have to deliver drugs to pay off a gang of people traffickers, but they are sustained by their bravery, their quick wits, and their unbreakable friendship – for a while, anyway. “Never before have these implicitly political filmmakers so nakedly allowed a moral parable to burn into the stuff of mad-hot polemic,” says Ehrlich. “Its premise pulls tighter until even the simplest actions are endowed with breathless intensity.”
Released on 2 December in the UK