Swedish filmmaker Lukas Moodysson gained an international audience by making two honest and ultimately uplifting movies about adolescence. Show Me Love (1998) and Together (2000) entered the sometimes ...

An emotional roller coaster ride through a living hell, "Lilya 4-Ever" is a hard-hitting, dark and tragic story that rarely lets up. With this story of a young Russian girl who escapes one hopeless ...

The Back Row Manifesto’s Incredibly Personal, Completely Subjective List of the Best Films of The Decade (2000-2009) will be unveiled over the course of the month of December. Think of it as a sort of ...

Whether writer/director Lukas Moodysson intended for the viewer to anticipate his every move in the dizzyingly depressing “Lilya 4-ever” or that predictability simply stems from the film’s focus, a ...

SHE'S a precious flower, this Lilya, a plucky, good-hearted 16-year-old Russian girl. But in "Lilya 4-ever," Lukas Moodysson's chokehold of a fairy tale, people pluck Lilya (Oksana Akinshina) petal by ...

A Russian teen (Oksana Akinshina), abandoned by mom, and with only a glue-sniffing boy (Artiom Bogucharski) for a friend, descends into poverty and wretchedness while dreaming of a better life ...

As Lilya 4-Ever opens, 16-year-old Oskana Akinshina, the Lilya of the title, lives in a rundown housing complex "somewhere in what once was the Soviet Union." At home, she sleeps in a cramped room ...

The 16-year-old title heroine (Oksana Akinshina), living in the former Soviet Union, is abandoned when her mother leaves for the States, befriended by an equally desperate 14-year-old boy, and ...

Subscribe to the newsletter for thoughtful coverage of Lilya 4-Ever — deep film analysis, contextual essays on its themes, and curated resources to deepen your understanding of the movie and its ...

Lukas Moodysson’s powerful third feature is a rigorously structured, unforgettable work, dominated by the performance of Oksana Akinshina as a Russian teenager abandoned by her mother and forced into ...

Lukas Moodysson, a young Swedish director, crafts a stunner of a film out of familiar turf. Lilya, 16, is dumped by her mother in the former Soviet Union. Drifting through Europe, she lives on scraps ...