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The Mother

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United Kingdom · 2003
Rated R · 1h 52m
Director Roger Michell
Starring Anne Reid, Daniel Craig, Peter Vaughan, Steven Mackintosh
Genre Drama, Romance

A grandmother has a passionate affair with a man half her age, who is also sleeping with her daughter.

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What are critics saying?

70

Village Voice by 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.

50

Variety by 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

L.A. Weekly by 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.

60

TV Guide Magazine by 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.

100

Los Angeles Times by 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.

60

New York Magazine (Vulture) by 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.

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