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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

64
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69
Ashes of Time Redux
68
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54
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76
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xx
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Christmas Tale, A
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Cthulhu
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Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
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Frost/Nixon
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Girl Cut in Two, A
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Other End of the Line, The
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77
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Religulous
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RocknRolla
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Sixty Six
85
Slumdog Millionaire
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Special
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Stranded: I Have Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
67
Synecdoche, New York
82
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83
Trouble the Water
43
Tru Loved
83
U2 3D
59
We Are Wizards
55
What Just Happened?
89
Man on Wire
85
Slumdog Millionaire
84
Momma's Man
84
Christmas Tale, A
84
Happy-Go-Lucky
83
Trouble the Water
83
U2 3D
82
Tell No One
82
Rachel Getting Married
82
Frozen River
82
Let the Right One In
81
Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
79
Stranded: I Have Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
78
I've Loved You So Long
77
Pray the Devil Back to Hell
76
Betrayal - Nerakhoon, The
75
Pool, The
73
Girl Cut in Two, A
72
I Served the King of England
71
Frost/Nixon
70
I.O.U.S. A
69
Ashes of Time Redux
69
Fear(s) of the Dark
68
August Evening
68
Hunger
67
Synecdoche, New York
64
Appaloosa
63
JCVD
63
Eden
63
Changeling
62
Duchess, The
59
We Are Wizards
57
Special
57
Sixty Six
56
Religulous
55
Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The
55
What Just Happened?
54
Battle in Seattle
54
Good Dick
53
RocknRolla
51
Morning Light
50
Breakfast with Scot
47
How About You
47
Choke
46
Dukes, The
43
Tru Loved
43
Gardens of the Night
41
Cthulhu
40
Igor
40
Other End of the Line, The
34
My Name Is Bruce
34
Otto; or Up with Dead People
32
Repo! The Genetic Opera
31
Hounddog
30
Guitar, The
28
Fireproof
27
Lake City
26
House of the Sleeping Beauties
26
Filth and Wisdom
xx
Dostana
xx
Black Balloon, The
xx
Let Them Chirp Awhile
xx
Local Color
xx
Nobel Son
xx
Extreme Movie
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
|
Mother, The
Sony Pictures Classics
FILM:
MPAA RATING: R for sexual content including graphic images of sexuality, language and brief drug use
Starring
Anne Reid,
Peter Vaughan,
Anna Wilson-Jones,
Daniel Craig,
Danira Govich,
Harry Michell,
Rosie Michell,
and
Izabella Telezynska
May is an ordinary grandmother from the suburbs. When her husband dies on a family visit to London, she recedes into the background of her busy, metropolitan children's lives. Stuck in an unfamiliar city far from home, May fears that she has become another invisible old lady whose life is more or less over. Until she falls for Darren, a man half her age who is renovating her son's house and sleeping with her daughter. (Sony Pictures Classics)
| GENRE(S): |
Drama
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Hanif Kureishi
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Roger Michell
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: October 12, 2004
Video: October 12, 2004
Theatrical: May 28, 2004
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
112 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
UK |
British Actress of the Year (Reid), 2004 London Critics Circle Film Awards

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
100
Los Angeles Times
Kevin Thomas
Every element of The Mother, directed by Roger Michell and written by Hanif Kureishi, fits together with perfection. The film's staging -- the way its settings create a world that allows for striking images that echo the psychological interplay of its people, the way in which every performance could not be any better -- is awe-inspiring.

100
San Francisco Chronicle
Ruthe Stein
Daring in its affirmation that a dowdy woman in her late 60s still can let go of her inhibitions and exhibit a lascivious side.

100
Dallas Observer
Melissa Levine
The first exceptional drama of 2004, The Mother feels like life itself, sharpened to its finest points.

100
Portland Oregonian
M. E. Russell
Powerful, subtle, quietly terrifying film about the consequences of a widow's stab at a May-December romance.

90
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Nathan Rabin
Harsh, unsparing, unsentimental, and uniformly well-acted, The Mother bravely and intelligently tackles subject matter widely ignored in cinema--the sexuality of a plain-looking woman edging toward the twilight of a life of quiet desperation.

90
Slate
David Edelstein
It's a remarkable film--one to gnaw at you and keep you up at night.

88
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
The Mother peers so fearlessly into the dark needs of human nature that you almost wish it would look away. It's very disturbing.

88
Miami Herald
Marta Barber
You feel terribly sad and angry at May's foolishness. Yet with so many emotions at hand, The Mother never fails to engage.

80
The New Republic
Stanley Kauffmann
This film holds and convinces, even evokes empathy, because of Anne Reid, an actress long experienced in British television and film. She gives May intelligence and spirit and a somewhat genteel wonder at the resurging of desire.

80
The New York Times
Stephen Holden
The screenplay bluntly faces anxieties of aging that are rarely voiced in the movies, and it is too hard-headed to offer comfy palliatives.

80
Salon.com
Stephanie Zacharek
Reid is stunning here.

75
New York Daily News
Jami Bernard
Turns out to be a thoughtful, beautifully acted story about feeling alive before it's too late to feel anything.

75
Boston Globe
Ty Burr
In reality, it's messy in the way that life is, and with a rare and welcome obstreperousness.

75
Entertainment Weekly
Lisa Schwarzbaum
Director Roger Michell (''Notting Hill'') conveys some of the sharpest insights into the woman buried beneath the wife and mother in those early scenes, using ragged, vérité-style camera work that takes merciless inventory of a certain stripe of posh, hard-edged modern family life in which dowdy grannies are invisible.

75
Chicago Tribune
Michael Wilmington
Self-absorption is the vice of all these characters. That, not sex, is their sin--and Michell, Kureishi and their fine cast show this with a lucidity that cuts to the bone, a candor that draws blood.

75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Jennie Punter
The complications of its story are found in the deep complexities of emotions and family relationships.

70
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
Finally, we have found ourselves in a movie where the characters are free to blunder, even if it means turning their backs on us. There's powerful liberation in that, all around.

70
Washington Post
Stephen Hunter
You may not enjoy The Mother (I certainly didn't), but it's a movie so heavy on truth, its spell cannot be denied.

70
Chicago Reader
Andrea Gronvall
Although this shares some of the acidity of Thatcher-era films, it owes more to David Lean's "Summertime" in its generosity toward an aging heroine who learns that any second chance is fraught with risk.

70
Village Voice
Dennis Lim
By turns expansive and astringent, The Mother is a portrait of a woman who, with the dazed courage of someone finally awakened to the world after decades of passivity and repression, keeps on walking.

60
TV Guide
Ken Fox
The film is marvelously acted all around, and the fact that there isn't a false note in the entire film is especially impressive given Kureishi's melodramatic contrivances and the fact that his characters are clichés whose behaviors are predictable at nearly every turn.

60
New York Magazine
Peter Rainer
There is in The Mother a rich understanding of where old age takes you. Along with the myth that seniors don't have sex drives, the film dispels a larger one: that the years bring wisdom.

50
New York Post
Megan Lehmann
A promising film that is dragged down by the weight of its gray morbidity.

50
Variety
Derek Elley
A portrait of a contempo British family drifting apart because of generational differences, The Mother ends up an uneasy brew of too many competing tastes and themes.

50
LA Weekly
Ella Taylor
The Mother winds up unpersuasive, in large part due to writer Hanif Kureishi, who visits on all his mopey characters such calculated savagery, it's hard to care much for them or to get onboard for the hope implied in the hastily stitched-on ending.

50
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
William Arnold
There's not a vaguely sympathetic character in sight; Kureishi ultimately seems prudishly disapproving of his heroine's last gasp of sexual adventure; and what another writer might have found liberating and healing, he finds distasteful and destructive.

50
Austin Chronicle
Kimberley Jones
A certain inevitability hangs over The Mother as if any of this could end well but if Kureishi's framework is perhaps predictable, his knotty, complex characters are not.


The average user rating for this movie is 7.8 (out of 10) based on 6 User Votes
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