Most critics are won over, and have been since 1964. Eleven of fourteen reviews are positive, and the praise gathers in the same places: Julie Andrews, whose nanny is repeatedly described as exact and a little unknowable; the Sherman brothers’ songs; and the sequences that put live actors among cartoon penguins. The chimney-sweep dance and Poppins’s arrival are named as set pieces that still work, and later writers, returning for anniversaries, find it has held up.
The reservations are scattered. Dick Van Dyke’s Cockney accent is the commonest complaint, raised by Time Out and The Times. Empire finds it overlong and would cut it. The sharper dissent is contemporary: The New Yorker thinks the whole thing too polished and too expensive to feel true, an oversized St Paul’s standing for the problem, while The Times finds it softened from the books and heavy of touch. Slant, reading it as a muddled tract on matriarchy, is the outlier. The spread runs from thirty to a hundred, which is wide for a film this well liked.