Critics reviews

Coogan wrote the screenplay with Jeff Pope. It's smart and unsweetened... As Philomena, Dench has a climactic confrontation toward the end that's remarkable for how even she remains throughout... This kind of rational acting might not be for everybody. We've been conditioned to expect fireworks during a showdown. Dench goes a different direction. She defuses, which makes her restraint all the more devastating.

Even if the sociopolitical diffusion didn't dilute Philomena's power as a finger-pointing polemic, the tonal ping-ponging between banter and pathos would still make for an uneasy alliance. Thank heaven, then, for Dench, who makes the best of a daffy-to-tragic biddy role; you haven't lived until you've heard Dame Judi casually declare, "I didn't even know I had a clitoris."

Philomena" turns out to be a subtly told tale of tragedy and redemption, with much of the sentimental payoff you're expecting but several intriguing plot twists along the way... Dench and Coogan have such wonderfully prickly chemistry together, and are so full of surprises, that their relationship never feels fake, and Frears is not a director to overmilk moments of sentiment.

For all of its road-movie character comedy,Philomena is essentially about how a person reconciles their faith with an organized religion's misdeeds, with Phil as the Catholic-in-crisis and Martin as her atheist observer. This is where the movie finds its most moving moments (accompanied, invariably, by Alexandre Desplat's twinkly score), and also where it takes its biggest stumbles.

Steve Coogan does cocksure arrogance better than any Brit, but lately, he's steered a course toward complexity—and now he's arrived at something truly great. Developed and coscripted by the star himself, Stephen Frears's absorbingly complex latest takes the journalistic urgency of The Queen and adds a feisty layer of religious sparring, something you won't find in American films.

The film constantly leans on Philomena's naïveté for laughs, and the portrayal feels patronizing even (or especially) when it's attempting to be charitable toward her simple lifestyle. Martin remains a miserable jerk throughout, but it's clear that despite his misdeeds we're meant to side with his rational view of the situation, his obstinate refusal to grant forgiveness for the horrendous misdeeds committed toward this innocent woman.

Coogan and Jeff Pope's adaptation of Martin Sixsmith's 2009 book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee keeps sentimentality at bay while Frears adroitly strikes the right balance between the barely suppressed emotional pangs of Dench's no-nonsense performance and the dry-humor comic relief provided by Coogan. It's the quintessence of unapologetically middlebrow good-taste, and it's emphatically not aimed at those awaiting the next aesthetic leap forward in cinema.

This is Frears' strongest film in quite some time, the simplicity of the material giving rise to a series of ever-more-complex and subtly articulated spiritual quandaries. The material is never rendered as a simple case of theism (Philomena) versus atheism (Sixsmith), and instead has both characters being made aware of the intellectual fallibility of their chosen creed.

Frears modulates the emotional pitch carefully: The picture is never too saccharine or too bitter. And Dench and Coogan are marvelous together. The two grate against each other at first, romantic-comedy-style, before settling into a bumptious arm-in-arm rapport.

Timing its unexpected reveals with Swiss-watch precision for maximum pathos, and patronizing its salt-of-the-earth title character by playing her cultural and intellectual limitations for sympathetic laughs, "Philomena" is human interest filmmaking of a classy and highly effective order, but its repeated sneers at the adjusted-reality fixation of modern middlebrow culture are more than a little disingenuous.