Ladybird Ladybird

Ladybird, Ladybird...could have been a predictable tear-jerking docudrama, but is too honest to stack the deck. Read full review

Although based on a true story, Ladybird Ladybird is also a parable of how government’s giant cogs sometimes crush individuals and never miss a turn. Loach puts us where we can hear the people crying. Read full review

What makes "Ladybird, Ladybird" work so well-what enables Loach's actors, especially Crissy Rock and Vladimir Vega, to bring off such extraordinary, deeply moving scenes-is the film's strange mixture of compassion and an unsparing eye. [20 Jan 1995, p.C2]

Tough, mean and unsparingly honest, Ladybird, Ladybird is the kind of movie that people resist going to, feel edgy while sitting through and then can't shake off for weeks afterward. [31 Mar 1995, p.C3]

A powerful experience. [20 Jan 1995, p.B]

Ladybird Ladybird tackles this troubling tale with documentary-style realism, showing profound sympathy with the protagonists while dispassionately revealing the enormous divide that exists between ideals of harmonious family life, on one hand, and a network of inadequate social policies, on the other. [29 Nov 1994, p.14]

Based on a true story, Ken Loach’s powerful and disturbing British drama (1994) about a single working-class mother with four children from four different fathers is made unforgettable by stand-up comedian Crissy Rock’s lead performance and by the filmmakers’ determination to make the story as messy and as complex as life itself. Read full review

It's an unforgettable portrait of human anguish and the price that any society must pay when its best intentions go awry. Read full review

Ladybird, Ladybird is full of heart and compassion, but it's also uncompromising and unconsoling. [10 Mar 1995, p.52]

There can be no denying, however, that the director captures the hopelessness of such troubled lives with greater force than any of his peers and that his work has staying power because its truthfulness is beyond question. [30 Jun 1995, p.L30]

It is social criticism written with tears. [15 Feb 1995, p.E01]

Based on a harrowing true story and fueled by a blistering, full-throttle performance from newcomer Crissy Rock, Ken Loach's LADYBIRD, LADYBIRD reconfirms his status as dean and foremost exponent of the British tradition of social realism. Read full review

One of Ken Loach's more harrowing evocations of working-class British life, anchored by Crissy Rock's performance as a hard-knocked Liverpudlian battling for the right to raise her children. [23 Oct 2014, p.54]

Loach's film offers something dearer than any crowd-pleaser can: the bracing consolation of a truth told without dilution. Read full review

Ladybird, Ladybird is full of powerful, disturbing imagery. It offers a portrait of a woman victimized by a powerful and unfeeling bureaucracy, one that will literally rip a newborn out of the arms of its parents. But it's not didactic. [10 Feb 1995]

Ken Loach's new film, "Ladybird, Ladybird," takes us deep inside the true story of a woman who is a long-term victim of brutal men, and examines her predicament with such intimacy and ambiguity that the experience becomes the very antithesis of cliche. [27 Jan 1995]

The film doesn't preach against the government in Rock's behalf, but does sympathize with her plight - a genuinely loving mother and former child-abuse victim who probably is unable to live up to her maternal aspirations. [09 Dec 1994, p.8D]

Ladybird, Ladybird is a scathing indictment of a meddlesome social-service sysBased on a true story, and set in a large English city, it is wrenching viewing, guaranteed to make complacent audiences reconsider their attitudes toward social welfare, single parents and the lot of battered, state-dependent women. [27 Jan 1995, p.12]

Ladybird, Ladybird is a tough, utterly absorbing film even at moments when it seems to skirt some of the fine points of Maggie's difficulties. Read full review

Though the movie sounds irredeemably depressing on paper, there’s a real warmth to the central relationship that lifts “Ladybird” above similar-sounding exercises in Brit self-loathing. Read full review

Impressive because Loach keeps things simple in an accurate social study. Read full review

The power of “Ladybird, Ladybird” is inseparable from its weaknesses. Loach brings us up close to the misery but, in a larger sense, he stands back. Read full review

As social critique, the film provokes pity and anger, not thought: understandable, since it's never quite clear exactly what Loach is attacking. Read full review