Ladybird Ladybird

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

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

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

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]

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]

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.

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