Much of this is due to Staunton’s performance, and sometimes her character’s borderline inability to speak. Everything you need to know about her character is shown through her tremulous speech and the terror in her eyes...

| Feb 20, 2024

Vera Drake acts as a potent reminder of where society has been and it was a frightening and dangerous period of history that no woman should have to re-live and this film makes that crystal clear.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 26, 2022

The family scenes are meticulously constructed. Leigh's concern for the fate of his often repressed and damaged characters is genuine and rare.

| Mar 5, 2021

A high-quality drama which lays bare one of the great moral conundrums of our time, provoking much thought on the issue of terminated pregnancy without declaring how you should think.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 13, 2020

Cleverly, Leigh has plucked a thorny issue from the past and used it to highlight inequalities that still exist. Leigh, the grandfather of British social cinema, has no time for nostalgia.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 23, 2019

The heroine of Mike Leigh's wonderfully subtle and relentlessly harrowing new film is a cheerful, compactly built middle-aged woman who spends her waking hours in perpetual motion.

| Nov 19, 2013

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 7, 2008

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 27, 2007

In a hopelessly polarized debate, Leigh allows us to see real people involved in real situations. The film will keep people on either side of the abortion debates talking.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 10, 2006

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 1, 2006

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 6, 2005

Word "great" doesn't do justice to what Imelda Staunton delivers with her performance.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 4, 2005

Staunton lends the role of Vera a great emotional complexity, eschewing any facile moral response to the social and sexual issues at the heart of the film.

| Jun 21, 2005

Imelda Staunton delivers an indelible performance as a woman with a frighteningly simplistic idea of the world and how to live in it.

| Original Score: B+ | Jun 20, 2005

Moralmente complexo, está longe de representar uma experiência 'satisfatória' para o espectador, que sairá emocionalmente esgotado do cinema. Isto o engrandece ainda mais.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 13, 2005

La película confirma a Mike Leigh como uno de los mejores representantes del cine británico, y a Imelda Staunton como una de sus mejores actrices.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 7, 2005

Puts a tender human face on this explosive subject.

| Original Score: B+ | May 4, 2005

Vera Drake succeeds because Leigh is not interested in sloganeering but in looking at the human and moral cost.

| Original Score: B+ | Apr 13, 2005

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 5, 2005

Despite an occasionally hampering pace, Vera Drake is worth [it] because of its impeccably conceived and acted characters and the moral quagmire they present us with.

| Apr 5, 2005