Most critics take to Riff-Raff warmly, and most are surprised by how funny it is. The consensus is that Ken Loach lightens up here and lets the banter on a London building site carry the film: labourers divided by accent and background, united in contempt for the men paying them. Bill Jesse’s script draws steady praise for catching the texture of casual work, its scams, dangers and camaraderie, and the reviews credit the semi-improvised, unstarry casting for making the men sound like men rather than mouthpieces. Several note that the politics arrive without a sermon attached.
The reservations are small. Time Out finds the romance subplot wavers and that some improvised scenes slide into chaos. The spread is narrow: six reviews sit close together at good rather than remarkable. The one dissenter is Empire, which finds the anecdotes loosely strung, the late turns melodramatic, and the whole thing a television film shown on the wrong screen.