Metacritic reviews

Mike Leigh is at the peak of his powers with Vera Drake, a compassionate, morally complex drama that stands easily alongside his best work, "Secrets & Lies" and "Topsy-Turvy."

Vera Drake puts the passion in compassion. Building up to a shattering conclusion, Leigh's movie is both outrageously schematic and powerfully humanist.

Stunning and compassionate period drama.

The acting is brilliant and Leigh's screenplay - developed through his usual process of improvisation and rehearsal - is very long on compassion, very short on preaching and politics.

The English director Mike Leigh's best work in a decade.

Using Staunton's face as his canvas, Leigh crafts a powerfully moving film that is unmissable and unforgettable.

It's difficult to think of another recent film so seamlessly rendered or that envelops an audience so completely in its period authenticity.

Marvellous, though it is smaller in emotional range than such earlier Mike Leigh films as the goofy bourgeois satire "High Hopes" (1988), the candid and piercing "Secrets & Lies" (1996), and the splendid theatrical spectacle "Topsy-Turvy" (1999).

When one of the young women Vera attends to nearly dies of complications, the police arrest her -- and the movie goes thud, taking Staunton's performance along with it.

The film's screenplay is thick with major lapses in logic, resulting in a story that ultimately makes little sense.