Metacritic reviews

It’s simply a very well done movie that features Maggie Smith’s best work in years (and, yes, she’s better here than any of her years on “Downton Abbey”).

Smith’s performance, honed from the previous stage and radio versions, is terrifically good.

A wonderful Maggie Smith plays all this dead straight, poker-faced for maximum laughs. It’s a peppery, unsentimental performance. She’s hysterically funny, till she’s not – flooring you as the regret and tragedy behind Miss Shepherd’s vagabond life is revealed.

Unshowy to a fault, Hytner delivers a fine, moving comedy of English manners between a writer and his eccentric tenant, which slowly deepens into an exploration of human bonds.

It's an honest and incisive and peppery examination of one of his life's strangest but most enduring relationships — and the way that timidity and kindness often work out to being the same thing.

It's Smith's eccentric oldster who is the film's driving force, and the 80-year-old actress doesn't disappoint.

Smith’s appeal, just, holds together a thin plot upon which Bennett, who wrote the script, and director Nicholas Hytner have loaded gimmicks.

Low on narrative drive, and marred by a misjudged final-act swerve into extravagant whimsy, Nicholas Hytner’s amiable luvvie-fest is enlivened by Smith’s signature irascibility.

Though director Nicholas Hytner does his best to enliven the material, Bennett very much comes across as a dull man’s Charlie Kaufman, even more so when the movie ends with flat, unearned whimsicality. Good as she is here, Smith must cede this round to Dench.

The film's annoying glibness is neatly summarized by the line: "In life, going downhill is an uphill job."