Bird frequently feels as if we’re in an extended vignette where we’re tagging along for a ride with no beginning, middle or end.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 1, 2025

This film is an interesting shift for the director in that it adds magical realism to the social realism that underpins previous works such as Fish Tank (2009) and American Honey (2016).

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 21, 2025

It meanders at times, but it soars too, lifted high on a belief love and family really do matter, no matter how scrappy and unconventional a form they may take.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 19, 2025

What struck me more was the film’s interpretation of Bailey’s coming of age not as something to be mourned or that comes on too soon. Instead, it’s an activation.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 4, 2024

I think the leap of faith doesn't entirely work but I kind of went with it, not least because it felt like a positive move.

| Nov 23, 2024

In this ecstatic coming-of-age drama set among the squatting classes in Northern Kent, England, Newcomer Nykiya Adams, in a refreshingly natural performance that carries the movie, plays Bailey.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 15, 2024

“Bird” at least maintains a heartbeat of ache and affection for youth in all its rudeness, revealing a filmmaker who isn’t afraid of losing her claws if she traffics in the thing with feathers.

| Nov 15, 2024

There are pieces of a great movie here, but they never quite come together in a way that allows a gifted filmmaker to take flight.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 15, 2024

Bird is a very Andrea Arnold film, from a director whose stories always orbit strong-minded young women. For all Keoghan’s star power and Rogowski’s diligence, Adams is the centre of the film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 13, 2024

Having long inhabited the gritty, social realist end of the spectrum, Arnold ventures into magical realism for the first time. If, like me, you’re somewhat allergic to the genre in its more twinkly and whimsical forms, fear not: this version has teeth.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 11, 2024

There’s value to holding onto that child’s-eye view, and Bird, more than anything, is an ode to that fact.

| Nov 9, 2024

Fish Tank director Andrea Arnold returns to kitchen sink realism - and finds freedom and joy over darkness.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 8, 2024

While Bird still employs an interest in socially vulnerable characters, its viewpoint feels less rooted in authentic struggle than in sensationalistic strife.

| Original Score: B- | Nov 8, 2024

It’s a fragile but beautiful vision, and marks the strongest blend yet of Andrea Arnold’s primary directives as a filmmaker.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 8, 2024

Though the more fantastic symbolic concepts of “Bird” don’t take flight as they’re meant to, the film’s human portraits give it vibrancy.

| Nov 8, 2024

“Bird” would make a pretty good stage musical — not just because people always seem to be singing, but because it’s achingly, heartbreakingly sincere, and for a character living in chaos, that sincerity can feel like magic.

| Nov 7, 2024

Adams delivers a great performance that is at times blunted by Rogowski’s typically peculiar and captivating comportment and Keoghan’s haywire antics.

| Nov 7, 2024

Bird may be the most divisive movie of Andrea Arnold’s career, and we’re including the gloriously feral 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights. But like everything else she’s done to date, it’s also rewarding in unexpected ways.

| Nov 7, 2024

Writer-director Andrea Arnold establishes a rich world of complicated characters and beautiful, poetic moments.

| Nov 7, 2024

Instead of being “too real for ya,” “Bird,” with its in-your-face poverty and narrative extremes, never feels particularly real at all.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 6, 2024