Variety: If crotchety upper-class vagrant Mary Shepherd hadn’t turned up on the North London doorstep of the celebrated playwright Alan Bennett, he might have had to make her up — if only to give Maggie Smith, our veritable Garbo of dingbat hauteur, one of the most tailor-made leading roles of her late career. Then again, perhaps Shepherd was partly his idea: The tension between life experience and authorial invention is the one complicating factor in “The Lady in the Van,” an otherwise heart-coddling, crowdpleasing study of two eccentric introverts — on opposite sides of the poverty line — finding common ground in more ways than one. 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; silver-dollar auds should turn up, if not in droves, at least in healthy vanloads.
Neil at Skewed and Reviewed really enjoyed the film as well as the acting as he said that it showed that everyone has a story to tell.
A touching story that's both convincing and sweet, with a real emphasis on wit and heart over simple narrative.
Full review by Carlos Menjivar on Popzara Press
EW: Some 15 years after starring in the West End play of the same name, Maggie Smith returns to her role as the titular Lady in the Van, playing a real-life homeless woman known as Miss Shepherd, who parked the van she slept in on writer Alan Bennett’s street. Bennett, who’s played in the film version by Alex Jennings, offered to let Miss Shepherd move her van onto his driveway for a few weeks back in the early ‘70s. She ended up staying for 15 years.
