Reception
What score did Peter Bradshaw give The Kid with a Bike?
The Kid with a Bike
The film received near universal acclaim. It scored a 96% "Certified Fresh" approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 109 reviews; the film review aggregate site described the critical consensus that the film "is a heart-wrenching, thematically and spiritually rich drama." Jonathan Romney wrote in "Screen Daily": "After the slightly sub-par "Lorna's Silence" (2008), the brothers are back on peerless form with this story of innocence betrayed and befriended, which must count as one of the best films about childhood since "Kes" – or for that matter "Bicycle Thieves", to which it surely nods." Romney further commented: "Shooting as usual with cinematographer Alain Marcoen, and in their familiar stamping ground of Seraing, the brothers this time bring a somewhat different, airier look to their locations, more suburban than in the past. Marcoen's camerawork, also, is rather more free-wheeling than the tightly constrained (and often imitated) tightness of "The Son"." At the 2011 London Film Festival it was among "Sight & Sound"s 30 recommendations; according to them, "The Dardenne brothers may be the most consistently high-achieving filmmakers of our time – the kings, if you like, of poetic neorealism. Like all their films, "Le Gamin au vélo" ("The Kid with a Bike") is near perfect." Upon its March 2012 UK release, Peter Bradshaw gave it (four stars out of 5) and said it "revive the memory of De Sica's 1948 classic "Bicycle Thieves""; it is a "heartfelt, boldly direct film composed in the social-realist key signature of C major, revisiting the film-makers' classic themes of parenthood, trust and love. "On the negative side, one critic called the film "trite" and its thinking "lazy", while another reviewer called it "formulaic" and "superficial".