also discouraged Lowden from finding out too much about the singer, and banned him from reading his autobiography or watching old TV appearances, so that the character – a troubled and introverted teen before he started a band or became at all successful – could be played as written. Reception On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 52% based on 65 reviews, with an average rating of 5.53/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "England Is Mines smartly assembled cast and strong sense of place are often enough to compensate for this unauthorized biopic's distance from its subject." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 45 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian gave the film three out of five stars and wrote: "Morrissey gets the cuddly Billy Liar treatment in this weirdly generic movie about his early teen life in Manchester that sometimes seems to be straightforwardly channelling the kitchen-sink spirit of 60s British cinema that Morrissey famously adored – but with much less of the acid irony and alienation that he extracted from it." Owen Gleiberman in Variety stated: "England Is Mine just feels like a stopgap movie made by people who couldn't afford to get the rights to the Smiths' catalogue. The poster calls it a meditation 'on becoming Morrissey,' but it would be more accurate to describe it as a movie about waiting around dejectedly until there's nothing left to do but become Morrissey." Tim Robey in The Telegraph gave England Is Mine two out of four stars and wrote: "The film romanticises the ambitions hatched in male bedrooms and gives the embarrassing impression that's where all sincere art springs from. It's like being crushed in a vice of angst." Jeannette Catsoulis in The New York Times stated: "Skirting sexuality and absent Morrissey's music (the movie ends in 1982 as he and Johnny Marr are on the brink of forming the band), England Is Mine is a soggy schlep. But if you're among those who believe that great art rarely foments in the cheerfully well-adjusted, then this one's for you." Alan Scherstuhl in the Village Voice praised the film's acting, and wrote: "'Are you going to sulk all day?' our hero gets asked just minutes into Mark Gill's England Is Mine. The remaining eighty-plus minutes of this muted, sometimes