Critics reviews

Regardless of what viewers make of Bird’s duality, as both a man heartbroken over his family and an animal endowed with supernatural powers, Arnold grapples with the very real dilemma of how to keep one’s senses, and spirit, alive, against uncertainty and pain.

Bird ultimately reads as Arnold “playing the hits” with a narrative she fundamentally knows how to stage in her sleep.

There are hilarious scenes, cheesy moments, and even self-aware references that Saltburn fans will appreciate, but there is also a great deal of poetry in this stunning film, mostly conveyed through magic realism, which Arnold and cinematographer Robbie Ryan (Poor Things) master flawlessly.

Arnold has form in casting established actors opposite first-timers and it can work very well... here, Rogowski’s gift for nuance renders his scene-partner, Adams, oblique and distant. Bird’s wings are clipped by Arnold’s inability to marry fantastical storytelling with grounded concerns.

Bird spreads its wings slowly, but ends up soaring away from its dingy broken-Britain locations in a moving flight of hope and empowerment.

What the film finds in Bailey’s journey is messy, melancholic, and, following one quite significant leap by Arnold, tied to something closer to magical realism. This may throw some of those expecting it to remain grounded, but that only makes the moment it takes flight all the more arresting. It’s a big swing, but a worthwhile one.

Arnold knows just how to get under our skin. If we struggle to settle into all this misery to begin with, by the end we’re as invested as we could be. It was that way with Fish Tank and American Honey too; a jolt of culture shock that makes way for universal human truths.

[T]he film takes magical-realist flight and transforms into something unlike anything Arnold’s done before. Thanks to the director’s magisterial knack with actors (especially non-professionals such as terrific adolescent discovery Nykiya Adams, who, as the protagonist, is in nearly every frame of the film), the result is quite entrancing.

Despite some bumps along the way, she lands a tone that balances a fearless focus on life’s tough realities with a hefty dollop of teary sentiment.

There is so much beauty in “Bird,” both within the relationships unraveling onscreen and on the screen itself... In Bird’s soulful eyes lay not pity but empathy, a love of others so freely given to those who need it most. It is so very moving to witness it.

All you can ask from a film-maker is creative ambition and the capacity to take big swings with their material. Andrea Arnold, the director of Fish Tank, Red Road and American Honey, has taken her biggest swing yet with a movie that is by turns strange, beguiling and deeply moving.

As she did in American Honey, Arnold seamlessly blends bigger-name actors and their more fledgling costars; Adams and Buda are terrific finds. Together with Arnold’s wise guidance, they make something odd and affecting, a picture of people finding means both practical and fantastical to bear up and—though not in the corny British way...