Mother and Child
Metascore
64

Generally favorable reviews - based on 32 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 23 out of 32
  2. Mixed: 8 out of 32
  3. Negative: 1 out of 32
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  1. New York Observer
    Reviewed by: Rex Reed
    100
    A flawless film of heartrending realism about the eternal chord that binds parents and children and the emptiness when they are separated.
  2. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    88
    The film is founded on three performances by Annette Bening, Kerry Washington and Naomi Watts. All have rarely been better.
  3. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Melissa Anderson
    80
    The force of the acting alone almost compensates for some of the more difficult (and realistic) questions about not giving birth that García willfully sidesteps.
  4. Variety
    Reviewed by: Todd McCarthy
    80
    An insightfully observed and exceptionally acted ensemble piece precisely about what the title suggests.
  5. Rolling Stone
    Reviewed by: Peter Travers
    75
    In Mother and Child, he (Rodrigo Garcia) creates an emotional powerhouse.
  6. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Michael Phillips
    75
    Garcia's calm, steady guidance behind the camera, along with his nicely finessed faith in a very good cast, makes Mother and Child a fuller and more satisfying example of this storytelling style than we've seen lately.
  7. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Kyle Smith
    75
    High praise for the movie Mother and Child: It's as good as a TV show. Although it's not as fine as HBO's "In Treatment," a show run by this movie's writer-director, Rodrigo Garcia.
  8. Philadelphia Inquirer
    Reviewed by: Carrie Rickey
    75
    While on its face, Mother and Child is about the impact of adoption, in its heart Garcia's movie reckons how consequential motherhood is in the calculus of womanhood. The fine actors show how we bond to those not related to us by blood - and also how we love. Bring Kleenex.
  9. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Mick LaSalle
    75
    Still, the goodwill lingers, even though Mother and Child falls down, dies and is beginning to look a little green and stiff about 15 minutes before the finish line.
  10. USA Today
    Reviewed by: Claudia Puig
    75
    Mother and Child is as tangled as the emotions that link parents and children.
  11. New Orleans Times-Picayune
    Reviewed by: Mike Scott
    75
    If nothing else, Garcia's movie is a brave one, with its unflinching look at adoption, which -- as overwhelmingly compassionate an act as it is -- often leaves behind deep emotional scars.
  12. St. Louis Post-Dispatch
    Reviewed by: Calvin Wilson
    75
    Unfortunately, Garcia can't quite resist sentimentality, giving us an ending that's a bit too emotionally neat. Still, Mother and Child is a thoughtful and provocative film about the way we live now.
  13. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: Shawn Levy
    75
    Something like a finely-written and -acted soap opera. That isn’t death, but it’s less like life than you’d hope.
  14. Tampa Bay Times
    Reviewed by: Steve Persall
    75
    Mother and Child is depressively interesting, with characters constantly ruining their best chances at happiness.
  15. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Keith Phipps
    75
    Garcia shoots Mother And Child with minimal flare, an approach that keeps the focus squarely on the cast, whose moving work helps pave over some of the narrative’s lumpier patches.
  16. Movieline
    Reviewed by: Michelle Orange
    70
    Garcia, despite creating yet another vibrant canvas for his actors, deflects the burden of this toughest and most modern of familial conundrums, offering instead the bland, regressive ideal of motherhood as not only redemptive but required.
  17. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Elizabeth Weitzman
    70
    Very few actual mothers will appreciate the manipulative ending, which even a child could spot coming an hour away.
  18. Arizona Republic
    Reviewed by: Bill Goodykoontz
    70
    Eventually, all of the stories will come together in a somewhat contrived way. The film's parts are greater than the whole. But the parts are worth the effort.
  19. New York Magazine (Vulture)
    Reviewed by: David Edelstein
    70
    Mother and Child is suffused with grief and loss. It’s also suffused with compassion and insight.
  20. Time
    Reviewed by: Mary Pols
    70
    The movie unfolds with novelistic pacing for a leisurely but engaging two hours.
  21. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: J.R. Jones
    70
    This is well worth seeing for Bening's arresting, unpleasant performance.
  22. NPR
    Reviewed by: Ella Taylor
    65
    When it comes to family togetherness, love and quality time are thicker than blood, water or just about any other social glue you can think of. That's the admirable if hardly news-breaking message of Rodrigo Garcia's domestic drama Mother and Child, whose official thread is the impact of adoption on three different women.
  23. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Ty Burr
    63
    Mother and Child glows for a good 90 minutes before an increasing reliance on contrivance and coincidence makes the lamp flicker and then fizzle out.
  24. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Kirk Honeycutt
    60
    Some may find the film overly schematic, but Garcia smartly uses three parallel narratives to probe the extraordinary nature of motherhood.
  25. Time Out New York
    Reviewed by: Keith Uhlich
    60
    A believably unbalanced Bening scores the movie’s true coup: Karen’s revitalizing relationship with a sweetly persistent coworker (Jimmy Smits) is a rare example of Hollywood doing right by midlife romance.
  26. Boxoffice Magazine
    Reviewed by: Steve Ramos
    60
    Annette Bening is the most pivotal character in the movie, both angry and scared.
  27. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: A.O. Scott
    60
    You may not quite trust Mother and Child -- its soft spots and fuzzy edges give it away -- but you can believe just about everyone in it.
  28. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Lisa Schwarzbaum
    58
    The hothouse drama Mother and Child is organized like a femme-friendly spa that specializes in treatments for the psyche rather than the skin. Soft New Agey music tinkles intrusively. Sore spots are prodded and massaged. Clients pass one another in the changing room. The ritual is exquisite to some, and excruciating to others.
  29. Miami Herald
    Reviewed by: Rene Rodriguez
    50
    Mother and Child is good when it takes a harsh, unsparing look at lament and the burdens we carry throughout our lives. Then it goes for your tear ducts, and we're suddenly stranded in Lifetime TV territory.
  30. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Ann Hornaday
    50
    Garca brings his finely calibrated sense of drama to the subject of adoption, which he handles with characteristic restraint and insight -- at least until the film's maudlin, too-pat finale. That sharp melodramatic turn is a shame, because so much of what has gone before in Mother and Child is of real quality.
  31. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marjorie Baumgarten
    40
    If the mother-child bond is the core human relationship, then this movie implies that we are an emotionally doomed species, though I do not think this was writer-director Garcia’s intent.
  32. Wall Street Journal
    Reviewed by: Joe Morgenstern
    30
    A slow and lugubrious film about the impact of adoption on the lives of three women.

User Reviews

All reviews »
User Score
8.1

Universal acclaim- based on 26 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4 out of 5
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 5
  3. Negative: 1 out of 5
  1. nutterjr
    Jul 5, 2011
    8
    Some bonds are so strong that when broken the individuals previously connected can no longer function properly. Mother and child explore the mother and child bond and the effects it has on a woman desperately needing to be a mom and also a woman and her daughter separated at birth. The performances are pitch perfect from Bening, Watts and the remainder of the cast.… Full Review »
  2. Diezmartinez
    Oct 22, 2010
    7
    La primera pelicula hollywoodense de la productora Cha-Cha-Cha (fundada por Cuaron, Gonzalez Iarritu y del Toro) es un solido woman's film que, a pesar de un final demasiado convencional, tiene un par de elementos a su favor: la limpia realizacion artesanal de uno de los directores de cabecera de HBO Rodrigo Garcia y un reparto uniformemente competente en el que brilla especialmente Annette Benning en el papel de una seca enfermera cincuentona que no deja que el amor llame a su puerta.… Full Review »
  3. jeremyp
    Sep 10, 2010
    10
    This is a movie with strong women front and center and much softer men definitely on the perimeter. Benning is incredible, and with her acting in "The kids are all right" she ought to at least get the best female actor of the season award. She plays a brittle, socially prickly spinster living with her frail ailing mother. We learn early that she gave up her child at 14, and we are to presume that this has brought her to cope by keeping people at a distance, which she does with great success through the personality of a haughty, reactive, woman with her own arcane sense of social propriety.

    The child she gave up is played by Naomi Watts, who is also a bitter loner who has her mother's genes and the story to match. Naomi's character is far more powerful than Bennings. While Benning is a shrill, cold, arrogant woman who's defensiveness is expressed in attack, Naomi is a control Goddess, who uses her intellectual and sexual power to move men around like pieces on a check board. She seduces her boss (Samuel Jackson in a mellower role) after taking umbrage at his inviting her to dinner alone. The message is clear: "I make the moves here." Then without much of a break she seduces the next door married neighbor. Because she can? Partly, but I suspect mostly to strike back at his wife's pregnancy.

    The third mother in this story is played by Kerry Washington a married woman determined to adopt the child she cannot conceive. The woman whose child she wishes to adopt (played with fierce intensity by Shareeka Epps) is another strong woman. She's not simply giving up a child she's going to arrange it's future environment as much as she can. She doesnâ    … Full Review »
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