There isn’t even close to a tear-jerker scene to be found, which tends to be a staple of these types of biographies, preventing it from having much resonance.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Mar 17, 2025

Coal Miner’s Daughter sugarcoats nothing, proffering a warts-and-all behind-the-scenes look at a union that was romanticized by the media.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 11, 2023

Unfortunately the back half of the film is rushed and overstuffed.

| Oct 21, 2022

A true original.

| Sep 14, 2022

Loretta Lynn's story on screen is a tonic for the spirit. A real tale which has universal appeal.

| Apr 7, 2022

It becomes yet another variation on the pressures-of-showbiz theme. All this is perfectly well handled, but lacks the freshness and originality of what went before.

| Apr 7, 2022

We don't so much root for Spacek as sit back and watch her tell us what happened. She's as much in control of this film as is her director.

| Apr 7, 2022

Ms. Spacek is a marvel. What other actress could convincingly play a character from age 13 to 36? It's one of those classic performances where we cease to even think of her as an actress. Up on that screen she is Loretta Lynn.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 7, 2022

Fortunately, Spacek and Jones are able to make up for the superficiality of the script. Spacek, who does all her own singing in a clear voice that is, at times, more affecting than that of Lynn herself, does one of her magical character transformations.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 7, 2022

Perhaps because director Michael Apted is English, his eye for American faces and his ear for American speech is more than refreshing in a town that usually goes for American plastic. Quite a good movie.

| Apr 7, 2022

Apted celebrates the woman, but fails to capture the performer. The musical sequences are void of the electricity that lured record audiences from the Carolinas to the Continent.

| Apr 7, 2022

The first part of the film is by far the most moving, and is almost continually captivating in terms of scenarios and backwoods settings.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 7, 2022

I was not surprised at Miss Spacek's performance, for she had done a similarly brilliant job in Badlands. What I was unprepared for was her musical talent... Had I not known better, I would have sworn it was Miss Lynn herself on the soundtrack.

| Apr 7, 2022

You can make what you want of this American success story, but once you sit down to watch it’s going to make you cry.

| Apr 7, 2022

Cliches are like tarnished silver. Remove the accumulated dross and what is still precious will emerge. Coal Miner’s Daughter does precisely that. It takes the rags-to-riches cliche and restores it to something beautiful to behold.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 7, 2022

It is a lovely, inspiring little movie -- part history, part sociology and, in largest part, a film ballad about a genuine real-life folk hero or, in this case, heroine.

| Apr 7, 2022

Despite a wonderful and convincing performance from Sissy Spacek, Coal Miner's Daughter falls back on the teary conventions of a heroine who can't pay the price of success... Such thinking has damaged an otherwise excellent movie.

| Apr 7, 2022

The rise of country singer Loretta Lynn... is charted amiably, sometimes movingly, and with quiet eye for detail, in Michael Apted's film, Coal Miner's Daughter.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 7, 2022

A careful, touching adaptation of the autobiography of the country singer Loretta Lynn, which floats along very beautifully for an hour and then falls to pieces.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 7, 2022

Spacek and Jones are a pleasure to watch, but we still come away feeling that a great deal of the dramatic potential of this extraordinary story has been betrayed.

| Apr 7, 2022