The Angels' Share Reviews
Top CriticIf you want to look for it, you'll find a layer of metaphor (the distilling process as a symbol of the characters' evolution) and social-realist commentary amid the gentle, life-affirming laughs.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
[Ken Loach] and his longtime screenwriter, Paul Laverty, find a good balance between drama and wacky character moments.
A lark, but it's a serious-minded lark, addressing issues of class and culture, the haves and have-nots.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Charming enough to satisfy even the trenchant-commentary crowd.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The film itself vaporizes before your eyes, but it's likable. Given its unstable mishmash of thuggery and whimsy, that's something of an achievement.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Like the spirit it celebrates, "The Angel's Share" is a neat little jolt of pleasure - and guaranteed to leave you feeling just a mite warmer.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
While a few farcical moments fizzle, it's mostly charming.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
[Mr. Loach] has gone and directed a comedy from a script by his longtime collaborator Paul Laverty, and it's so delightful that his fans will be clamoring for more.
Watching it is like receiving a hard slap in the face from someone who expects you to laugh it off, even though the sting lingers.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Graphically observant about the ease with which young men starved of opportunities can turn their energies inward to destroying themselves and one another.
While there's no ignoring the social ills that haunt Robbie's hopes, the movie's optimism serves as a cheeky, and surprisingly inspiring, retort.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Just how is one supposed to react, in 2013, to a non-ironic use of the Proclaimers' "(I'm Gonna Be) 500 Miles" in a musical montage?
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/10
Loach coaxes an endearingly poised performance out of nonprofessional Brannigan, and largely sells these scuffling characters as neither hopeless nor heroic-just terribly human.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
[Its] fleeting slapstick tendency wins out, regrettably diminishing the film's social consciousness in the process.
Loach's realism always carries a distinct sense of humor, volatility and, most alarmingly in this hypercapitalist new century, a socialist passion for The People.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
An amiable comedy about young Glaswegian roughnecks discovering the world of whisky, "The Angels' Share" finds helmer Ken Loach and long-term screenwriting partner Paul Laverty in better, breezier form than their rebarbative prior effort,
Loach and Laverty never fully resolve the yin and yang: the blood and the banter. But it's still rewarding to see these filmmakers exploring a different ton.
There is love, laughter and whisky galore in Ken Loach's unusually joyful comedy drama about delinquent Scottish youths defying the odds society has stacked against them.
