The website's critical consensus reads, "Kedi is a cat fancier's dream, but this thoughtful, beautifully filmed look at Istanbul's street feline population offers absorbing viewing for filmgoers of any purr-suasion.

"[9] Joe Leydon wrote in Variety, "[Ceyda] Torun, a Turkish-born filmmaker now based in the United States, and cinematographer Charlie Wuppermann, her partner in the production company Termite Films, take their audience on a leisurely yet purposeful journey throughout Istanbul (where Torun was raised) to examine a local phenomenon dating back to the heyday of the Ottoman Empire: Thousands of cats roam freely virtually everywhere and anywhere, peacefully co-existing with humans who learned long ago not to assume they are the masters in this situation.

They give the people around them a vision of another freer, wilder, more spontaneous form of life, one that can be easily lost in a huge, stressful, rapidly modernizing place like Istanbul.

"[11] In The Washington Post, Vanessa H. Larson wrote, "The camerawork skillfully mimics a cat’s-eye view, with extended sequences filmed just over the animals’ shoulders using remote-controlled camera rigs that follow them as they saunter around, forage for meals and get into hissing matches.

Interspersed throughout the film are also beautiful drone-captured aerial shots of Istanbul’s sprawling streets and the Bosporus waterway, which impart a strong sense of place.

"[12] Glenn Kenny wrote in The New York Times, "There’s a good deal of projection in the verbal accounts of the animals' lives, but the movie, with its mobile camera low to the ground or looking down at cat-navigated rooftops, doesn’t do much to contradict the indirect anthropomorphizing....