Variety by Scott Foundas

Director Christophe Honore's respectable, tightly coiled, but ultimately unrewarding adaptation of Georges Bataille's posthumous novel.

TV Guide Magazine by Ken Fox

For all its shocking content, it remains a rather conventional psychological portrait of Oedipal attraction taken to a disturbing extreme.

Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt

Based on a novel by French provocateur Georges Bataille, an important thinker whose fiction rarely translates into good cinema.

Village Voice by Jessica Winter

Can't transcend its own suffocating milieu.

The New York Times by Stephen Holden

Ma Mère may be ludicrous, but its cast displays a commitment that deserves more than grudging admiration.

Chicago Reader by Andrea Gronvall

So clinically detached it borders on absurd.

New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman

This tale of disaffected sexual depravity is practically a parody of the worst of French filmmaking.

L.A. Weekly by Scott Foundas

Honoré never gets beneath these characters' sunburned skins, and well before the end, the film tips irretrievably over into the realm of absurdity.

New York Post by V.A. Musetto

Huppert is wonderful, as usual, and she's to be congratulated for taking this daring role. But, alas, even she can't save Ma Mere.

Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas

Degrading, disgusting and depressing.