The reviews are uniformly warm. Most critics take the film as a portrait of a lower-middle-class English family at the close of the Thatcher years, and credit Leigh’s improvisational method with the actors for finding both the comedy and the sadness in it. The praise clusters on the performances, with Alison Steadman’s mother singled out as the one holding the household together, and on a mother-daughter confrontation that more than one review calls the emotional centre.
The spread is narrow and nobody dissents; the differences are of degree. The earliest American reviews rank it among the best of its year and among Leigh’s finest, while Variety and The New York Times are more moderate, admiring a sympathetic comedy that is funny without being uproarious. The AV Club is alone in reading it as a balancing act between grotesque comedy and pathos, and in noting a shift towards a kind of magic social realism in the score and style.