The Lady in the Van follows a fairly typical old-people-are-more-than-they-seem storyline ... The bizarreness of this true story is underplayed.

She's not easy to love and the film is slow-going and a little laboured in its attempts to shape her idiosyncrasies into a plot, but the gradual revelation of the reasons for her decline give Smith plenty of opportunities to soften her grouchiness.

Bennett offers Maggie Smith a chance to renovate her own recent persona with a woman who's heroically alive. Smith takes it with both hands, giving us more of the loneliness and despair of old age than the glib comedy.

...for the late, great Maggie Smith, The Lady in the Van was arguably the best of some twenty years of cameos and curtain calls…she makes a complex figure of Mary Shepherd, who parked her van in Alan Bennett’s driveway and remained there for 15 years...