Harris Dickinson is wonderful as a deadbeat dad in this working-class father-daughter film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 18, 2024

Scrapper refuses to be pigeonholed as another dreary story about working-class life. Grief has hope, youth holds the keys to everything.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 10, 2023

Delicately dancing the knife edge between too-cute and over-maudlin, the filmmaker and her terrific actors have given viewers that rarity in cinema: uplift without the dreary moralizing.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 18, 2023

Lola Campbell just [gives] a great performance... she and Harris Dickinson have really fun chemistry.

| Sep 15, 2023

I love this movie so much. This is going to end up in my top 10 list at the end of the year.

| Sep 15, 2023

Campbell is a revelation. This is her first movie role, and her performance is flawless.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 15, 2023

It’s a highly implausible scenario but, using a touch of absurdism, British writer-director Charlotte Regan pulls it off. With this sunlit film, she’s not making the usual gritty example of working-class naturalism we expect from the British.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 14, 2023

Lively, fluid camerawork by Molly Manning Walker – who recently won Un Certain Regard at Cannes with her directorial debut, How to Have Sex – chimes with the lovely two-step between Campbell and Dickenson. As plucky as the title suggests.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 7, 2023

Scrapper is a solar system of a film, with Campbell’s playful and defiant Georgie shining bright at its centre. You’ll not find many characters this year quite as likeable.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 29, 2023

Regan, a pop-promo veteran, is so invested in quirky interstitial sequences (talking spiders, fantasy outfit swaps) and Wes Anderson-style line readings that she leaves little room for engagement.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 25, 2023

An amazing directorial debut.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 25, 2023

Watching these two mutually suspicious strangers stumble toward forming a family makes Scrapper an invigorating treat, like finding wild flowers bursting out of broken pavement.

| Aug 25, 2023

If you appreciate no-frills finesse, you’ll be floored.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 24, 2023

This is Regan’s first feature, and it often feels like one, in both good and bad ways.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 24, 2023

It’s colourful, tender and sweet with quirky moments that are grounded in magical rather than social realism. And it’s just 84 minutes long, which is a boon.

| Aug 24, 2023

As engagingly scrappy as its name suggests — both pugnacious and fragmentary — Scrapper has plenty going for it.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 24, 2023

“Scrapper” is tender without falling into sappiness.

| Aug 23, 2023

Charlotte Regan’s film is a baffling clash of two incompatible visions.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Aug 21, 2023

Just hanging out together on camera is much more difficult than it looks, and Dickinson and Campbell manage it well. Regan looks like a very impressive and capable movie talent.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 19, 2023

There are few surprises in Scrapper, except its sickly sweetness: the girl is pushy but sweet, the friend is messy but sweet, the father is tough but sweet. Everyone is sweet: so is its twee style.

| Aug 18, 2023