Sweet Sixteen

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Loach is a super-realist, and Sweet Sixteen has the disarming feel of a documentary. It's a film that miraculously catches life on the fly, without apparent embellishment, cliche or melodrama.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

I'm not prone to like socially deterministic films of this kind, yet Loach is so masterful at squeezing nuance and truth out of the form that I was completely won over.

Variety David Rooney

Rendered deeply moving by the director's peerless capacity to combine humor and compassion with honesty and despair.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

With unsurprising irony, the "Sixteen" of the title foreshadows Liam's birthday and even worse calamity, which makes a grim and gripping story all the more heartbreaking.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

Sweet Sixteen shows that he's (Loach) as capable of anger as his protagonist and just as eager to draw attention to an unchanging problem: the blight of generational poverty.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

The explosively combative young hero, Liam (a brilliant performance by Martin Compston), has only the illusion of a fighting chance. Yet Sweet Sixteen is powerful because of the searing honesty with which it strips Liam of his illusions.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

With startling clarity and dreadful logic, Loach and Laverty make sense of every bad choice Compston makes until he runs out of options, locked into a destiny that he can't escape, mainly because his good intentions are clouded by tragic naivete.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

It's a classic story in form, and in this country it used to star Jimmy Cagney.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

It's one of the most emotional and compelling the filmmaker has ever made. Confident, uncompromising and blisteringly realistic, Sweet Sixteen is a gritty and immediate film yet it goes right to the emotions.

Village Voice Jessica Winter

In a remarkably subtle, assured debut performance, Compston evokes Billy in Loach's "Kes" and, in the heartbreaking final seaside shot, Antoine in Truffaut's "400 Blows."

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Compston's performance and the downer milieu, presented with appropriate paint-peeling profanity, are more than enough to keep an audience riveted and ultimately moved close to tears.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The movie's performances have a simplicity and accuracy that is always convincing. Compston, who plays Liam, is a local 17-year-old discovered in auditions at his school. He has never acted before, but is effortlessly natural.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

It's a beautiful, grim tale.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

In its peak moments, the movie delivers, all at once, genuine street wisdom and psychology and wrenching expressions of family and friendship.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

It's an uncompromising movie that illustrates one of the most convincing personality transformations that I have seen in a recent motion picture.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

In the grim and empathetic lost-youth drama Sweet Sixteen, the director focuses on a few failed souls -- rather than excoriate the system that failed them -- to produce a story of particularly streamlined, eloquent despair.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Paula Nechak

A hard film to shake and makes us think and think again.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

It's not a happy film, but there's much incidental, quotidian happiness in it. Like Lynne Ramsay's lovely "Ratcatcher," the movie is far from sentimental about children.

Dallas Observer Bill Gallo

There are no hearts and flowers in Loach's hard-edged world, no kindly interventions, no signs from heaven. Instead, he gives us the unvarnished facts about working-class exploitation and the failure of ambition in low places.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Watching this essentially good but misguided kid slide into a hopeless future is both transfixing and heartbreaking.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Loach has made more memorable films, such as "Raining Stones" and "Ladybird Ladybird," but his dramatic sense remains strong and his social conscience is absolutely unstoppable.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Not for all tastes, but it demonstrates Loach's skill as a poet of gritty semi-documentary filmmaking.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Compston, with Loach's uncanny guidance, gives a performance of such natural power you'd think you were watching a drama-class prodigy like James Dean rather than a moonlighting high-schooler.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

Martin Compston, the young man-child of Sweet Sixteen, had never acted before, but his combination of sweetness and rage -- part puppy, part pit bull -- gives Sweet Sixteen a shot of reality and a big, aching heart.

TV Guide Ken Fox

Dabbed with sentimental touches, the film nevertheless avoids facile victim psychologizing and pulls no punches.