The film stars Judi Dench as Philomena Lee, an elderly woman who has been searching for her son for 50 years, and Sixsmith's (Steve Coogan) efforts to help her find him.

Though Sixsmith is initially reluctant to write a human interest story, he meets Philomena and decides to investigate her case.

In 1951, Philomena became pregnant after having sex with a man she did not know at a county fair, and was sent by her father to Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea in Ireland.

The nuns claim that the adoption records were destroyed in a fire years earlier; they did not, however, lose the contract she was forced to sign decades ago forbidding her from contacting her son, which Martin considers suspicious.

Martin's investigation reaches a dead end in Ireland, but he receives a promising lead from the United States and invites Philomena to accompany him there.

His contacts help him discover that Anthony was renamed Michael A. Hess, who became a lawyer and senior official in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations.

Despite Philomena's pleas, Martin angrily breaks into the private quarters and argues with an elderly nun, Sister Hildegarde McNulty, who worked at the convent when Anthony was forcibly adopted.

The website's critical consensus reads: "Based on a powerful true story and led by note-perfect performances from Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, Philomena offers a profoundly affecting drama for adult filmgoers of all ages.

It is a comedic road movie, a detective story, an infuriated anticlerical screed, and an inquiry into faith and the limitations of reason, all rolled together.

It also has a surprising political subtext in its comparison of the church's oppression and punishment of unmarried sex ... with homophobia and the United States government's reluctance to deal with the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.Kelly Torrance of The Washington Times found that the film "ultimately feels false", with the filmmakers succumbing to the temptation to focus on the "lessons" the story holds at the expense of the human story itself.

[26] The visual blog Information is Beautiful deduced that, while taking creative licence into account, the film was 70.9% accurate when compared to real-life events due to "the (understandable) dramatic insertion of journalist Martin Sixsmith into the main plot line and big liberties with what Philomena actually knew and didn't know about her lost son".

[27] The film's principal antagonist, Sister Hildegard McNulty, existed in real life but the movie took broad artistic liberty to portray her in a negative light.

[28] Sister Julie Rose, the order's assistant congregational leader, said: "We do feel that the film, even though it is not a documentary, does not tell the whole truth and in many ways is very misleading.

[30] In a 2009 article for The Guardian, Sixsmith says that in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, the Catholic church forced unwed mothers in their care to give up their children for adoption.

[32] Sixsmith has said that Coogan's portrayal of him shared his "intolerance of injustice in all walks of life", and his admiration for a woman like Philomena who has the strength to rise above this.