- Critic Score
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100The strength of Leigh's film is that it is not a message picture, but a deep and true portrait of these lives.
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100Among its many excellences, Vera Drake functions superbly as a pure thriller; the last half is reminiscent in structure and detail of Hitchcock's "The Wrong Man."
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100The acting is brilliant and Leigh's screenplay - developed through his usual process of improvisation and rehearsal - is very long on compassion, very short on preaching and politics.
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100A marvel of character-driven drama that no serious filmgoer should miss.
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100This is the kind of people-driven story that the movies used to give us - before special effects took over.
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100Stunning and compassionate period drama.
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100In absorbing drama and staggering emotions, it renders an issue too often seen as black or white in heartbreaking gray.
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100Vera Drake puts the passion in compassion. Building up to a shattering conclusion, Leigh's movie is both outrageously schematic and powerfully humanist.
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100Mike Leigh is at the peak of his powers with Vera Drake, a compassionate, morally complex drama that stands easily alongside his best work, "Secrets & Lies" and "Topsy-Turvy."
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100Few movies have evoked the happiness of a good, strong family as genuinely as this one. And this affecting atmosphere makes the eventual outcome resonate with great power.
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91There's nothing harder for an actor to play than a thoroughly good character, and Staunton does it with a dowdy, sublime originality.
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Vera Drake is so patient, assiduous and attentive to emotional accuracy that it betrays the utter sloth of most of what we see when we go to the movies.
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90The English director Mike Leigh's best work in a decade.
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90As an evocation of English working-class life half a century ago, it feels utterly authentic, and is ennobled -- not too strong a word, I think -- by Imelda Staunton's performance in the title role.
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Sweet, strange and ultimately heartbreaking.
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90Much of the film's potency derives from its personal edge -- the passion for precise period decor, the title dedicating the film to Leigh's parents (a doctor and midwife), and even the childlike classification of many characters as either good souls or villains.
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88Using Staunton's face as his canvas, Leigh crafts a powerfully moving film that is unmissable and unforgettable.
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88Confirms Leigh's reputation as one of the world's master filmmakers - and showcases Staunton as one of its great actresses.
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88It does a masterful job of capturing a specific time and place while reminding us how timeless the abortion dialogue is.
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88The film is startlingly even-handed.
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88For those who have the patience to become absorbed in this kind of drama, Vera Drake offers a stunningly real character portrait whose image will linger long after the movie has faded.
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88No filmmaker, in any cinematic culture, has a better eye or ear for the working class than director Mike Leigh.
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It's difficult to think of another recent film so seamlessly rendered or that envelops an audience so completely in its period authenticity.
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80Painful for many reasons, but highly recommended.
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80One of the letdowns of Vera Drake is that once Vera is arrested, we lose her voice.
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80The issue may be polarizing, but Vera Drake resonates with such seriousness and truth that it transcends the narrow limitations of polemic.
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80This very patient film reaches out and unshakably grips us.
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80Marvellous, though it is smaller in emotional range than such earlier Mike Leigh films as the goofy bourgeois satire "High Hopes" (1988), the candid and piercing "Secrets & Lies" (1996), and the splendid theatrical spectacle "Topsy-Turvy" (1999).
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78In an era in which too many of us automatically accept women's right to choose, Vera Drake reminds us that the time for complacency is not now.
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75Makes a compelling argument for women's rights without ever succumbing to preachiness.
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75Expansive, but succinct. Leigh tells a small story and doesn't try to make something huge of it.
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75Imelda Staunton is absolutely astonishing.
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75In the end, this is a movie that doesn't respect its own power. Less of a stacked deck would have left Vera Drake to play a far more effective hand.
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70Staunton is phenomenal - she barely speaks throughout the entire last third of the film, but the power of her posture and distraught expressions are enough to break your heart.
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As lovely and heartbreaking as Staunton is to watch, there's something about Leigh's attachment to his politics that leaches some complexity from the experience
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70Leigh's directing is lean and tight. In Imelda Staunton as Vera, he has an actress who can make her only two emotions interesting.
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60When one of the young women Vera attends to nearly dies of complications, the police arrest her -- and the movie goes thud, taking Staunton's performance along with it.
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50As a character study Vera Drake is coarsely drawn, and as pro-choice polemic, it’s both a blunt instrument and a red herring. Which may be why, among all the moviegoers who staggered from the theater wielding soaked tissues, I was among the few who remained dry of eye, and raised of brow.
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50Marathon of misery.
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40The film's screenplay is thick with major lapses in logic, resulting in a story that ultimately makes little sense.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 23 out of 26
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Mixed: 1 out of 26
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Negative: 2 out of 26
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A beautiful film with a original and interesting story, with a brilliant performance of Imelda Stauton, a moving film, one of the best movies of 2004.
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HC.5
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MarkB.9