Metacritic reviews

It’s well performed and a periodically fascinating study of Bradford’s seedy underbelly that’s rarely seen on film

Lead actors Byrne and Deen do grounded, stalwart work, and director Mitu Misra occasionally succeeds in making the characters’ milieu’s register with force. But the storytelling is rickety.

A well-meaning look at the issue of arranged marriage, garnished with some Hollywood star power, but it’s too meandering and sluggish to grip.

A film that also aims for gangster grit, community awareness and emotional impact, but compromises on everything.

Any meager pleasures that Lies We Tell offers are purely technical.

Truth be told, Lies We Tell is a pretentious and muddled dud of a melodrama.

Very much to its detriment, Misra’s ambitious, overflowing soap opera of a debut is not content with being the character portrait that Byrne’s inherently interesting Donald deserves.

As much as director–co-writer Mitu Misra wants to show the oppression and repression that still have a stranglehold on Muslim communities in Britain, he does what a lot of first-time filmmakers do their first time out — he overplays his hand.