Variey has given Push a wonderful review. Here are some excepts:

An urban nightmare with a surfeit of soul, Push: Based on a Novel by Sapphire is like a diamond — clear, bright, but oh so hard. To simply call it harrowing or unsparing doesn’t quite cut it; Push is also courageous and uncompromising, a shaken cocktail of debasement and elation, despair and hope. Everyone involved deserves major credit for creating a movie so dangerous, problematic and ultimately elevating. Marketing will be a problem, because the shorthand description is so unpalatable. But this is, for all its scorched-earth emotion, a film to be loved.

Daniels never allows the film, however gothic and nightmarish, to lose its footing in the real world, and that world includes a certain amount of hope: Despite her mother’s hostility, Claireece enrolls in an alternative school where a teacher named Blu Rain (Paula Patton) prepares young women for their GEDs. Patton is terrific, beautiful but carrying the weight of the world in her eyes. And Claireece’s classmates, with their street-smart banter, give the film some needed levity.