Critics reviews

It is unclear if Frears saw Florence Foster Jenkins's aristocratic farce as a lighter, uptown version of A Face in the Crowd's native fascism, or why anyone thought that was needed. After her exposure in the press, Florence's angelic deathbed redemption furthers her self-deception into the cardboard heaven she sought in reality. Her dementia ends in the music of the spheres, hurting no one. It's a cheesy, gentle apotheosis with no repercussions outside her little world.

Pretty delightful with not enough depth as it wants. Definitely made me want to take back things I used to say about Hugh Grant's range—he's quite remarkable here.

Is it really everyone's duty to prop up the fragile egos of any delusional millionaire who demands public admiration? The film neatly sidesteps a sticky question, stifling our laughter rather than dealing with its implications.

This is quite a good film, and could've been a great one if it weren't so fatally soft-centred – though it mostly gets things wrong in the final act, which I won't spoil. Suffice to say that the script presents a wonderful dilemma, the kind with no easy answer.

As written by Nicholas Martin, it all comes across as a quaint stage farce where we're the audience waits for everything to go wrong. Underwhelming though it may be, the film isn't a complete write-off. And that is largely down to the superb performance by Grant, an expertly stirred and shaken cocktail of self-interest, self-loathing and grudging empathy.

Bouquets all round: Stephen Frears goes broad inFlorence Foster Jenkins, and the appeal should be wide. Playing the deluded songbird heiress, and equipped with an impressively padded girth, Meryl Streep hasn't been in such good-humoured form since 2009's Julie And Julia, delivering a comic aria while capturing pitch-perfect notes of pathos in a series of misguided operatic performances.

Florence Foster Jenkins" is an audience picture first and foremost: one wholly sympathetic to its eponymous subject's delusional drive to delight crowds with or without the requisite artistry.