Critics reviews

A beautifully moving piece of cinema, Crossing embraces the vital connections that leading with love, and not intolerance, can bring.

Akin felt impassioned about the power of images in the aftermath of And Then We Danced, and that belief is all over Crossing, a rich, poignant drama that’s optimistic in how three strangers unite in their battle for a better world.

Crossing is terrific: a rich and rewarding tapestry of characters and cultures flung together and flourishing.

Akin’s script attains a real humanism, one which surely harks back both to the 1960s glory years of Soviet Georgian cinema, and catches the intonations, almost always melancholy too, of local cinema production there in the last decade or so.

Akin is here working in a tradition established in Italian Neo-realism — and by the end of the film, he shows he can turn on the viewer’s tear ducts as deftly as De Sica did in his prime — but his narrative approach brings a vivid freshness to the proceedings.

[S]omething more nuanced emerges regarding our internal compasses... Akin’s “Crossing,”... It’s what gives this compassionate, cautiously hopeful movie’s open-eyed naturalism a wonderful, pulsating humanity.

[I]t establishes itself with a sharper grit than the kind of “Sundance movie” it sounds akin to, but doesn’t do quite enough to disguise the well-worn formula at play.

Elevated by its collection of wonderful performances, Levan Akin’s Crossing is a moving tale about human connection.

Crossing, the moving new film from Levan Akin...

Another film would make this Istanbul of sex workers and street kids the stage for something brutal and didactic. Akin gives even the shabbiest address the hint of a picture book, and matches every sadness with optimism.

Sounds cutesy, but Akin keeps his mood piece feeling natural and breezy... In this town, in this movie, you feel absolutely certain each face has its own fascinating story to tell.

Akin offers a moving portrayal of the bonds that can form between people who, on the surface at least, have little in common... The beating heart and hope of Crossing lies ultimately with collective activism rather than with family.