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The “movie star,” that mysterious creature whose blinding charisma pulls everyone into its irresistible orbit, is becoming an endangered species. That makes Jennifer Lopez —a movie star par excellence —the onscreen equivalent of a majestic snow leopard. Lopez can easily carry a film on her own, and her latest project, “The Mother,” is lucky to have her.

That’s not to say that the latest film from director Niki Caro (“Mulan”) and a screenwriting team led by “Underground” creator Misha Green would totally sink without its star. Like most Netflix movies, “The Mother” would be a perfectly serviceable thing to have on in the background while you tidied the living room or answered emails on your phone. The spy-movie setup is generic enough to follow while doing something else, and the villains’ motivations are only as specific as the plot needs them to be, which is to say, not very specific at all.

“The Mother” was screened for critics in theaters, where the immersive setup makes the paint-by-numbers portions of the plot really stick out. A handful of odd stylistic choices also attract attention in this format: A recurring visual motif of wide-angle shots with blurred edges; odd, jumpy edits seem to compensate for a lack of coverage on set.

But the big screen also provides a bigger canvas for the film’s picturesque locations, like wild Tlingit Bay, Alaska, the sweltering streets of Havana—and, uh, Cincinnati, Ohio. (Every spy needs a place to hide out.) More importantly, it’s also more real estate for Lopez’s face.

For the most part, that billion-dollar mug is set into an expression of grim determination in “The Mother,” which opens with an unnamed FBI informant (Lopez) and her handler Cruise ( Omari Hardwick ) barely escaping from a bloody attack on an FBI safe house in suburban Indiana. The informant soon becomes The Mother, as the pregnant ex-spy gives birth to a baby girl while in the hospital recovering from her wounds. She has two options: Either escape with the infant and stay on the run forever or sign over her parental rights so her daughter can have a normal life. She chooses the latter.

She never signs away her emotional commitment, however. And she continues to watch expectantly from the sidelines, waiting for the day when her past will also shape young Zoe’s ( Lucy Paez ) life. And indeed, just after Zoe’s 12th birthday, The Mother’s friend and confidant, Jons ( Paul Raci ), comes by her isolated Alaskan lakeside cabin with a message: Zoe is in danger. It’s go time.

As with her celebrated turn as a pole dancer in “ Hustlers ,” much of the excitement in “The Mother” is watching Lopez in motion. She swings a knife in hand-to-hand combat. She jumps across the roofs of cars in an urban foot chase. Even the subtle movement of loading and cocking a sniper rifle while lying belly-down on a rooftop is thrilling when she does it. Lopez translates her background as a dancer into gritty action choreography with the ease of a seasoned professional.

The film shifts gears about halfway in, as Zoe and her mother retreat to Mom’s cabin for a hybrid bonding session and wilderness survival course leading up to the fiery action finale. “The Mother” is arguably too long at 115 minutes, but it’s difficult to say which scenes, in particular, could have been cut; in its quieter moments, both Lopez and her young co-star Paez give convincing performances as the gruff mentor and pouty student.

If anything, the film could have used more of these moments, which feel real and tangible compared to the cardboard cut-out bad guys played by Joseph Fiennes and Gael Garcia Bernal. Either of these men, we’re told, could be Zoe’s father, and it’s their obsession with The Mother that drives the rest of the narrative. Get in line, fellas.

On Netflix now.

Katie Rife is a freelance writer and critic based in Chicago with a speciality in genre cinema. She worked as the News Editor of The A.V. Club from 2014-2019, and as Senior Editor of that site from 2019-2022. She currently writes about film for outlets like Vulture, Rolling Stone, Indiewire, Polygon , and RogerEbert.com.

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Film credits.

The Mother (2023)

Rated R for violence, some language and brief drug use.

115 minutes

Jennifer Lopez as Mother

Joseph Fiennes as Adrian

Omari Hardwick as Cruise

Gael García Bernal as Hector

Paul Raci as Jons

Lucy Paez as Zoe

Writer (story)

Misha Green
Andrea Berloff
Peter Craig

Cinematographer

Ben Seresin
David Coulson
Germaine Franco

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‘The Mother’ Review: Are You My Sniper?

At the heart of this action-thriller, an expert killer, played by Jennifer Lopez, must rescue her daughter at all costs.

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Jennifer Lopez, in a dark parka, looks toward the camera. Behind her is a snowy forest.

By Lisa Kennedy

A movie called “The Mother” is sure to have a lot of symbolism and this action-thriller, starring Jennifer Lopez as a trained killer who must protect the daughter she gave up, has plenty.

In the opening scenes, Lopez’s character, known only as the Mother, is interrogated by F.B.I. agents who are trying to get information on two arms dealers she has worked, and slept, with. Agent Cruise (Omari Hardwick) is respectful. The other agent (Link Baker), not so much — and tells her so with a hectoring monologue. (One of the film’s guilty pleasures becomes anticipating when a mansplainer will get hushed.)

In Niki Caro’s fast-paced film, Agent Cruise assures the Mother she’s safe. “No I’m not,” she says. Guess who’s right? Mayhem ensues and, in an act, stunning for its swift violence, we learn the Mother is pregnant. The newborn, Zoe, is placed with a loving family, and the Mother retreats to Alaska where the fellow soldier Jons (Paul Raci) has her back.

This arrangement has kept the Mother and child safe for 12 years when Agent Cruise reaches out with news that Zoe (Lucy Paez) has been found by the Mother’s former partners: Adrian Lovell (Joseph Fiennes) and Hector Alvarez (Gael García Bernal). Lovell is a nasty-smooth piece of work. As Alvarez, Bernal basks in some candlelit cruelty when the action shifts to Cuba.

What kind of resistance will the men encounter? Lovell trained the Mother as a sniper in Afghanistan. She also knows how to twist a blade.

They shouldn’t fool with the Mother’s nature. Apart from some deadpan exchanges between the Mother and Zoe, Lopez plays the role fierce. Even so, it isn’t always clear which gestures in the film should be taken seriously, and which make sport of the genre’s masculine posturing while offering an allegory about a birth mother’s sacrifice.

The Mother Rated R for gun and knife violence, some language and brief drug use. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Watch on Netflix.

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The Mother Reviews

Niki Caro’s tale of an assassin coming out of retirement to keep her daughter out of the crosshairs of some nasty people is the best kind of lean, mean fighting machine

Full Review | Aug 27, 2023

Jennifer Lopez makes, I think, a pretty good action star... This is sort of a generic action-flick that you may watch and forget about it about three minutes after seeing it.

Full Review | Original Score: 5.5/10 | Jul 24, 2023

Lopez is fit enough to handle the action scenes, but she just can’t sell the ruthlessness of the character. Apparently, it took no less than three writers to come up with this clichéd drivel.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 6, 2023

An exceptionally strong, emotionally-driven action-thriller...Directed at a cracking pace and with exceptional action-movie instincts by Niki Caro (Whale Rider; Mulan) [it's] a way-above-average thriller, with J.Lo at her finest.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 3, 2023

Maybe it is the repetitive middle or the structure of the movie, but it feels like it could have been paced more quickly and amped up the energy a little bit. I enjoyed this and would not be opposed to seeing Jennifer Lopez take on more roles like this.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 2, 2023

The Mother boasts an impressively weighty emotional core that ensures it hits hard when it needs to.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 1, 2023

With way too many flaws, a predictable plot, and generic and poorly developed villains, The Mother is an emotionless story and a waste of an action film. Unless you're a huge fan of J-Lo, I'd highly recommend skipping this one.

Full Review | May 26, 2023

The utterly predictable script suffers from a total lack of character development; the execution is ludicrous since JLo's hair and makeup are always flawless, perhaps because her expressionless face looks perpetually frozen.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | May 26, 2023

[This] over-familiar actioner is forgettable.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | May 24, 2023

What’s really depressing is the name behind the camera. “The Mother” was directed by Niki Caro, whose earliest efforts (Whale Rider, North Country) suggested a major talent in humanist cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | May 24, 2023

The no-nonsense Lopez holds the standard issue together and the action, as directed by Niki Caro, clicks by with the rapid-fire confidence of Lopez’s mom on the trigger.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 24, 2023

The best modern iterations of this kind of movie are The Long Kiss Goodnight and Aliens. I wonder if my overall fatigue with the genre isn't a product of my searching for those highs again in the intervening, largely disappointing decades.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | May 24, 2023

...a decidedly erratic piece of work that fares best in its exciting, action-packed opening stretch...

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | May 23, 2023

But even her fierce prowess -- and unfailing good looks while fighting, chasing, and slaughtering -- can't quite save The Mother from feeling like an amalgam of existing action films.

Full Review | May 23, 2023

The Mother nearly works but there are gaps in the story, as though long sequences are missing, making for a movie that is as emotionally distant as its lead.

Full Review | May 22, 2023

This forgettable action thriller is thoroughly derivative.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | May 22, 2023

A textbook example of a star vehicle, The Mother is competently executed and intermittently engaging, but is elevated only by Lopez’s presence.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 22, 2023

Lopez has more than earned the right to be the star, to put great men in supporting roles, and tell a story that unapologetically centers her.

Full Review | May 21, 2023

Despite well-choreographed action and a gritty performance from Jennifer Lopez, The Mother is not the Mother’s Day vehicle Netflix had hoped it would be.

Full Review | May 20, 2023

Lopez easily has the goods to do a late career segue into action hero mode, but would appear to need a new agent and/or manager to help arrest the piling-up of bad movie vehicles that waste her prodigious talent.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | May 20, 2023

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‘The Mother’ Review: As a Military Sniper Who Comes Out of Hiding to Protect Her Daughter, Jennifer Lopez Anchors an Inflated Action Movie

She occupies the terrain of Statham and Willis in what should have been a 90-minute B-movie.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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THE MOTHER, from left: Jennifer Lopez, Lucy Paez, 2023. ph: Doane Gregory / © Netflix / Courtesy Everett Collection

In a movie career that stretches back 25 years, Jennifer Lopez has on occasion done flaked-out underworld thriller romance (“Out of Sight”), capery action (“Parker”) and revenge (“Enough”). Yet she has never placed herself at the center of such a down-and-dirty, grimly overwrought, execute-now-and-ask-questions-later B-movie as “ The Mother .” I’m tempted to call the film “minimalist,” because if you consider its bare-bones screenplay (by three writers!), its convoluted utilitarian set-up, its 2D villains, and its essential formulaic momentum, it’s a prime example of action filmmaking made basic.

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This is a rather tortured scenario, given that it’s mostly the film’s way of setting up an adult-meets-kid action movie like “The Professional” or “Logan.” Those films were far better (because their scripts felt like more than diagrams). “The Mother,” as a Lopez vehicle, reminded me of nothing so much as Liam Neeson’s recent run of revenge potboilers. Yet there’s a way you can enjoy some of those films almost for their limitations; it’s all about pinning your entire investment on the karma of Neeson. “The Mother” was directed by Niki Caro, the New Zealand filmmaker who made the soulful and acclaimed “Whale Rider” 20 years ago, and Caro keeps the focus on the Lopez heroine’s obsession. She may not have seen her daughter for 12 years, but her connection to her is primal, and that’s what drives the action. She’s doing what she does because she has to.

The film leaps locations nearly as much as a nuclear-arms thriller, but once Lopez ambushes the palatial Cuban estate where Hector (Gabriel García Bernal), one of the two arms dealers, has lured her (their face-off, backdropped by church candles, is stylized enough to feel like something out of a “John Wick” film), she retrieves the endangered Zoe and takes her to the cabin, nestled in the snowy pine wilderness of Alaska, where she herself hid out for those 12 years. Paul Raci, the intensely compelling actor, all sinewy furrowed thought, who played the self-actualizing deaf halfway-house guru in “Sound of Metal” is Lopez’s old military comrade, and Joseph Fiennes is Adrian, the other arms dealer — a scarred psycho who will pursue Lopez to the ends of the earth. But she knows he’s coming. So she trains the tween Zoe in her survivalist techniques, which is a touch preposterous, but whatever.

The climax features Adrian coming at her with a dozen henchmen on snowmobiles, a sequence that brought me back, momentarily, to the ski chase in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” This one has no such majesty. It’s a lot of blam-blam , with the bodies picked off like video-game fodder. “The Mother” is watchable product, but Lopez proves that she can rousingly carry a picture like this one. The truth is, it doesn’t do her justice. Her character is by training a sniper, and at one point she has to pick off some villains by shooting into a crowd in a way that no world-class sniper would ever do. It made me think: Forget this slovenly, opportunistic action. What Lopez deserves to star in is a new-world remake of “The Day of the Jackal.”

Reviewed online, May 10, 2023. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 116 MIN.

Production: A Netflix release of a Nuyorican Productions, Vertigo Entertainment production. Producers: Jennifer Lopez, Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, Benny Medina, Roy Lee, Miri Yoon, Marc Evans, Misha Green. Executive producer: Molly Allen.
Crew: Director: Niki Caro. Screenplay: Misha Green, Andrea Berloff, Peter Craig. Camera: Ben Seresin. Editor: David Coulson. Music: Germaine Franco.
With: Jennifer Lopez, Joseph Fiennes, Lucy Paez, Omari Hardwick, Paul Raci, Gael García Bernal.

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Jennifer Lopez looks fierce while wearing a hooded fur coat in The Mother.

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Netflix’s The Mother misses a clear chance to make Jennifer Lopez an action star

Mulan and The Whale Rider director Niki Caro forgets what J.Lo does best

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Ask any great screen fighter, and they’ll tell you: Movie fighting is much more like dancing than like real fighting. Bruce Lee was famously a champion cha-cha dancer, Patrick Swayze successfully transitioned from dancer to action star, and scores of movies from India have shown how terrific dancers make for terrific screen fighters.

That’s the opportunity director Niki Caro ( The Whale Rider , Disney’s live-action Mulan ) has with Netflix’s The Mother , a dark action thriller starring Jennifer Lopez as a nameless assassin thrust back into action to protect the daughter she gave up at birth. Lopez is a singular talent who has excelled in the crime genre with Out of Sight and Hustlers. She’s an enjoyable comedic actor, and she’s particularly strong as a dancer, coming up as a Fly Girl on In Living Color before hitting global superstardom through her dance-centric music videos.

Jennifer Lopez leaps over the top of a car in The Mother.

Unfortunately, neither of those skills gets much use in The Mother , which doesn’t give her much to work with. The plot and her character are darkly serious, and the most exciting action sequences involve long-range gun fights and vehicle chase scenes. The few hand-to-hand combat sequences are edited beyond recognition, robbing viewers of any chance to follow the action or appreciate the work Lopez put in for this role.

“She had to learn how to fight, and she’s really good,” second unit director Jeff Habberstad said in a behind-the-scenes video about her training for the role. “Dance and choreography background makes it so she’s just real coordinated.”

The Mother opens at an FBI safe house, where Lopez’s very pregnant character (credited only as “The Mother”) is acting as an informant, with agents interviewing her about a pair of dangerous arms dealers. The interview ends badly, with a hard-to-parse fight scene (thanks to Netflix’s compression and some dark lighting ) that leaves her isolated, unfairly on the outs with the FBI, and forced to leave her new daughter behind. (Just saying this sequence strains credulity would be an understatement.) She makes a deal on the side with FBI agent Cruise (Omari Hardwick), who will watch her daughter and contact her if anything goes wrong. Twelve years later, she’s moved to Alaska, and gets the message that something indeed has gone wrong.

The movie’s entire setup is a series of thinly drawn characters and conflicts. In The Mother , people recite the title character’s biography to her in order to build her legend, rather than letting us see it and believe it for ourselves, or having characters tell each other about her, as if she were a spooky story (a tactic used in John Wick , and, more recently, Sisu ). Bad guys illustrate that they’re evil by pushing down nuns in the street. Gael García Bernal plays a cartoonishly villainous arms dealer who says things like “You sold your soul to the devil, how do you look so good?” — which sounds like fun, but instead plays out as another rote bad guy who sexually menaces the protagonist with a series of played-out aggressive pickup lines, like some sort of perverted wind-up doll.

Jennifer Lopez, wearing a leather jacket, stands protectively in front of Lucy Paez, in front of a motorcycle, in The Mother.

The most interesting part about The Mother is the relationship between The Mother and her estranged daughter Zoe (Lucy Paez). A small portion of the movie is spent with the two of them together, as The Mother teaches Zoe to drive, shoot, and fend for herself in the Alaska wilderness. The two of them getting to know each other and forging a connection through circumstance is the best narrative thread in The Mother , but Caro speeds through it quickly. It’s shocking when The Mother at one point refers to the “months” they’ve spent together — it feels like a week, maximum.

Some of the action beats do work better than others. A sniping scene outside a villa sees The Mother picking off guards from far away, allowing for some creative blocking and framing as the bodies drop one by one. Some later sequences in snowy Alaska at least look nicer than the poorly lit interiors from the first half, and are more exciting, including an explosive snowmobile chase and shootout. There’s also a funny gag where The Mother hits a guy with her car as a nearby wedding party does the bouquet toss, and the edit matches his flight through the air with the bouquet’s similar arc.

Jennifer Lopez lies down with a sniper rifle in the snow, with a heavy fur coat on, in The Mother.

But Caro and editor David Coulson even undercut those moments with bizarre cuts that pull the story’s punches. In one scene, The Mother is brutally interrogating a gangster, hitting him repeatedly in the face while asking questions. She actually has barbed wire around her fist, which Caro only shows after The Mother is done punching him, rather than building anticipation for the brutality by showing her wrapping her fists with it. Then The Mother waterboards him, which gets her the information she needs within seconds, because apparently we’re in the 2000s again.

The Mother is the second straight-to-streaming Jennifer Lopez action movie this year, following the Prime Video action comedy Shotgun Wedding . While The Mother goes for more emotional depth, Shotgun Wedding at least recognized Lopez’s central talents and used them, giving her an opportunity to flex her comedic chops as well as her movement skills. The end result for Netflix is a missed opportunity to redefine a generational star as a bona fide action hero.

The Mother is streaming on Netflix now.

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‘The Mother’ Review: Jennifer Lopez Is Mother in Niki Caro’s Slick Thriller

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Directed by Kiwi filmmaker Niki Caro (“Whale Rider,” “Mulan”) , “The Mother” sees two business-savvy women making a mark on the most masculine of genres — and pulling no punches. While it’s far from groundbreaking, “The Mother” is a satisfying nail-biter grounded in a genuine (albeit familiar) emotional setup. Besides, we’ve seen enough violent thrillers about lone wolf fathers protecting their children while the helpless wives sits at home. It’s high time the mothers came out to play — and much more realistic to boot. Related Stories Aaron Sorkin Confirms ‘The Social Network’ Follow-Up: ‘I Blame Facebook for January 6’ Jessica Lange Says the Best Modern Films Are Not Made in America: ‘We’re Living in a Corporate’ Hollywood

Lopez’s character is never named in the film ; her singleminded mission is defined by her sole identity being “Mother.” The action opens with a pregnant mother in custody with the FBI, where she warns her handler Cruise (Omari Hardwick) that the location is not secure. Ignoring her predictions, the facility is soon under siege from a mercenary group led by her former partner Adrian Lovell (Joseph Fiennes, firmly in his villain era). Luring her one-time lover into a bathroom, he stabs her pregnant belly before a makeshift firebomb surrounds them both in flames. As shower water rains down its protective bubble, the title credits roll.

Inventing a fake line-up as a reason to bring her in, Cruise informs her that her daughter’s cover has been blown and she may be in danger. For the first time, she learns her name is Zoe (Lucy Paez) and sets sights on her in the wild. While scoping her out from a safe remove, she happens to witness an abduction in real time, but even she can’t act fast enough to save Zoe from being taken. After an impressive shootout that sees her punching through a rusted-out truck bed to climb into the carriage, she and Cruise hatch a plan to get Zoe back. Adopting aliases, they head to Cuba in search of her other ex-partner, the thinly-sketched but still sketchy Hector Alvarez (Gael Garcia Bernal).

It’s a lot of action with not many surprises, but the sharply staged blowouts and chemistry with Cruise add a nice momentum to the predictable proceedings. Doling out her checkered back story in various flashbacks, we learn that Adrian recruited her to work for him during her military training, introducing her to Hector in the meantime.

It’s a hell of a lot of setup to get what becomes the real meat of the drama: The time she spends with Zoe back in her remote woodsy cabin. Determined to teach Zoe to protect herself, Mother runs a tight training regimen of target practice, hand to hand combat, and wilderness survival. A wolf mother and her pack of cubs may be a heavy-handed metaphor, but it gets the job done (and it’s a pretty impressive feat of animal handling.) Though her inability to connect with Zoe emotionally doesn’t quite pack the dramatic punch the film needs, the lull in the tension is well-paced within the narrative, and the culminating action scene delivers on the requisite thrills. It’s not quite a Bond movie, but some very agile snowmobile drivers keep things exciting.

“The Mother” starts streaming on Netflix on Friday, May 12.

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Screen Rant

The mother review: a solid action drama with a standout jennifer lopez.

The Mother doesn't always hit the mark, but it gets close. What's gained is a better insight into how well Caro works with emotionally-driven stories.

Jennifer Lopez is back in her action bag with The Mother from Netflix. Directed by Niki Caro from a screenplay by Misha Green, Andrea Berloff and Peter Craig, The Mother follows the titular character (Lopez) who becomes an FBI informant. The Mother is a lean, mean actioner, but one that could have benefited from better editing and a tighter script. That’s not to say that the film is terrible or unbearable by any means, it's just that it is a straightforward narrative that does not require a nearly two-hour run time to tell it right.

Lopez's sniper-turned-informant, aka The Mother, targets are arms broker Adrian Lovell (Joseph Fiennes) and arms dealer Hector Álvarez (Gael García Bernal). The men aren’t just high-level targets for the FBI, they also pose considerable risk to The Mother as she is pregnant, and one of them is presumably the father. After a botched assassination attempt on her, she is forced into a terrible choice, and The Mother flees to protect her daughter. Years later, she is forced out of hiding when Lovell and Álvarez discover the girl and seek revenge on The Mother for burning down their operation.

The film's screenplay is simple, losing much of the fat that would typically be left for dramatic effect in other films, such as a long-winded backstory filled with lust and betrayal and an earnest romantic interlude amid a rescue mission. The mother-daughter component is relatively sturdy, making up most of the feature. Lopez and Lucy Paez handle themselves well when they get into the nitty-gritty of their characters' dynamic. The familial drama isn’t overwrought or overstuffed, though the second act does drag a bit too long as the distance between mother and daughter shrinks. The third act brings the film to a slightly anti-climactic, predictable end, but its familiarity and simplicity allows The Mother to shine.

Caro’s directing is slick and to the point, but it's hindered by choppy editing and some poor staging. This is less of a Caro issue, however, and more of a Hollywood one, as the movie cannot just settle into the action scenes. Tension can’t be built off quick cuts and cutaways for different angles. John Wick and Atomic Blonde proved great emotion, drama, and, most importantly, anticipation comes from just allowing the action to play out one or two beats longer than usual. Quick cuts can be explained as a means of covering up mistakes, stunt doubles, and the choreographed nature of the scene, and sometimes it works to get the energy up. In The Mother , the editing just lessens the impact of the titular heroine's daughter being kidnapped. Luckily, Lopez is in fine form as an action lead here, with Omari Hardwick providing her with backup in some of the earlier and crucial action sequences designed to showcase The Mother’s particular set of skills.

Caro finds the quiet moments when it is just Lopez having to piecemeal her character’s complicated emotions, or the chunk of time in the second act where The Mother must unload her baggage. The movie manages to let these moments ring the loudest, though these scenes just exacerbate the issue of how hectic the editing is in the action sequences. There is hardly any monologuing or exasperating debates about The Mother’s sacrifices and her daughter's discontent with her situation. Every bit of dialogue is just enough, edging just close enough to the edge of too much before pulling back in time. Regardless of the ineffectiveness of the action sequences, the film unfolds with confidence.

The key to the confidence of this movie is Jennifer Lopez. She is committed to her work. The Mother is hurt and jaded. Her accomplishments are evident in her stance, short responses, and clear-eyed conviction. There isn’t much to the script, but Lopez is able to fully embody the role and effectively project the character's emotional arc. The story pulls from a strangely long history of women-led action films consisting of the heroine’s journey boiling down to her ability as a parent; however, this story works for Lopez. The actress can play tough and stern just fine, but she possesses an inherent warmth that lends to the maternal instinct her character tries to deny.

All in all, The Mother is a good time. It doesn't always hit the mark, but it gets close. Caro doesn’t break new ground, but what's gained is a better insight into how well the director works with emotionally-driven stories. Honing the skills to become a great action director takes time and patience, but The Mother indicates she is on the right path. The film adequately showcases that Lopez can challenge herself in the action sphere. If she so chooses, she may find herself paired with the right creative team that can help her navigate an action film that doesn't pull punches.

The Mother is now streaming on Netflix. The film is 117 minutes long and rated R.

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<i>The Mother</i> Plays It Too Straight—But J.Lo’s Appeal Is Eternal

The Mother Plays It Too Straight—But J.Lo’s Appeal Is Eternal

N ot since Stella Dallas has a mother made so many selfless sacrifices for her daughter. Not since Taken has a protective parent fended off so many rotten baddies. Mush those two genres together—the classic women’s picture and the pulpy, rage-driven action adventure—and you get The Mother, in which Jennifer Lopez plays the mother to end all mothers, a mysterious assassin who slinks out of retirement to protect the daughter (Lucy Paez) she was forced to give up a dozen years ago.

It all begins with an interrogation. Lopez’s the Mother—her character, a womb with balls, has no name—slouches elegantly in some messy safe house somewhere, staring down a couple of no-nonsense FBI interrogators. She glowers from the cocoon of her artfully ragged cashmere hoodie as they pepper her with questions. Where are the two dangerous arms dealers she’s been tangling with? Was she really romantically involved with both of them? At the same time, even? Before the tough-guy feds can get answers, possible baby daddy number one (Joseph Fiennes) crashes their pad and attempts to blow them to smithereens. One of the agents (Omari Hardwick) nearly succumbs to his wounds, until the Mother, thinking quickly as mothers do, mends the gaping hole in his side by squirting some household glue in there. Then she retreats to the bathroom to fashion a Molotov cocktail from a bottle of tea tree shampoo, crouching in the shower as she awaits the man she knows is coming for her. By this point we see that she’s tremendously pregnant, and she’ll protect this baby at all costs. Woe betide Adrian, who dares jab at her stomach with a knife. Her tea-tree bomb burns him to a crisp. Or does it?

The Mother. (L to R) Jennifer Lopez as The Mother, Lucy Paez as Zoe in The Mother. Cr. Doane Gregory/Netflix © 2023.

Read more: The 16 Best J. Lo Movies of All Time

The Mother would, of course, like to keep this baby, but the FBI whisks the infant away shortly after she’s born. There’s nothing left for the newly bereft Mother to do but retreat to Alaska, where a former colleague ( Paul Raci ) offers her shelter in a shabby-chic decrepit cabin. There, she lives a quiet and solitary life, blamming deer and other wildlife for sustenance. Years pass, with nary a delivery from FreshDirect. Then she gets word that her daughter, Zoe, now 12, may be in danger. The trek to save her offspring takes the Mother from Alaska to Cincinnati to Cuba, where she encounters possible baby daddy number two (Gael García Bernal), who now appears to be both sinister and crazy: he’s sequestered himself in a temple of religious candles and guns. The Mother is having none of it—isn’t it time he got a real job?—and Hector, too, meets a bad end.

Snowmobile chases, knife fights, J.Lo kicking the asses of anyone who threatens her tiny nuclear family: If that sounds like fun, it is, but almost in spite of itself. Director Niki Caro (Whale Rider, Mulan) approaches the material reverently, as a parable about the strength of women. In one of the movie’s most compelling scenes, the Mother lectures Zoe, a sullen preteen who has no idea how good she has it, on the damage tofu has wrought upon the world. This is some pretty tough love.

The Mother. Jennifer Lopez as The Mother in The Mother. Cr. Ana Carballosa/Netflix © 2023.

But how can we not laugh—with joy, not derision—when we see our favorite mom hunting stag in Alaska while wearing the lushest fur-trimmed hood this side of Fendi? Lopez is a marvelous actor, appealing in ways that go beyond any analysis of technique. As the shamelessly out-for-herself dancer Ramona in the 2019 Hustlers, she revealed layers of vulnerability beneath her character’s hard-shell veneer, and she brings her A-game champagne-bubble charm offensive even to low-stakes, low-key comedies like Marry Me. The Mother would be more effective if she could wink at the audacity of the material instead of just playing it all straight. But then, Lopez can get away with things that other mere mortals can’t, and if you approach it in the right spirit, The Mother could be ridiculously good fun. It needs to be watched with the largest group of J.Lo fans you can assemble, ideally people who know artfully applied highlighter when they see it in the wild. Forget automatic weapons; it’s the Beauty Blender that gets the job done.

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The Mother Reviews Are Here, And Critics Are Saying The Same Thing About Jennifer Lopez’s Netflix Action Movie

Just in time for Mother's Day.

Jennifer Lopez hit the big screen with two movies last year — the adorable rom-com Marry Me and then the romantic action flick Shotgun Wedding . This year it appears she’s leaving the romance to her personal life, with her new Netflix movie The Mother bringing straight action. JLo plays the titular character, a former assassin who comes out of retirement to protect her estranged daughter. The reviews are in, so let’s see if this is one you’ll be firing up with a bag of microwave popcorn for this Mother’s Day weekend.

Along with Jennifer Lopez , the cast of The Mother includes Lucy Paez in her first major role as daughter Zoe, and Joseph Fiennes and Gael Garcia Bernal as ex-boyfriends/arms dealers. The Hustlers actress was looking great in the first looks for the female-driven action movie, and the trailer promises we’ll get to see JLo kicking plenty of ass . Let’s get to the critics, starting with CinemaBlend’s review of The Mother . Our own Mike Reyes rates the movie just 2 stars out of 5, saying Lopez proves herself as an action lead, but the film never figures out how to mesh that with the emotional premise. He continues:

Seeing as Jennifer Lopez is the mother that gives the film its title, the failure to build her character causes a collapse on shaky foundation on which this movie is built. The action is too tame to raise your heartrate, and the drama is so basic that you can almost always guess what the next line’s going to be. Predictability doesn’t always kill a movie, but if you don’t add a little bit more to the pot to really flavor what’s being served, the result isn’t going to taste good.

Courtney Howard of AV Club grades The Mother a C+, agreeing with the above review that Jennifer Lopez delivers with both her powerful punches and empowering emotions, but the film overall doesn’t examine, augment or challenge the genre’s familiar formulas. The review states:

The film’s fabric experiences a few frays that lead to a sloppy unraveling. Around the midpoint, characters slowly stop behaving as humans, and behave more like puppets functioning on behalf of the story. It also suffers from a villain problem where both of the evil exes are barely one dimensional, neither oppressive nor genuinely menacing due to Fiennes’ and Bernal’s lack of meaty material. Screenwriter contrivances guide the second-to-third-act transition. The Mother’s considerable abilities begin to slip for baffling reasons that run counter to her established character—early on she can mend a bullet wound with superglue, but later she can’t stitch a bite wound.

Nadia Dalimonte of Next Best Picture rates the movie 6 out of 10, saying that while JLo brings a refreshing perspective on female perseverance, the film around her is flawed, with a screenplay that rushes storylines and action sequences that are edited so heavily they’re hard to follow. The critic says:

The film reaches more interesting heights in its second half when it focuses on how the mother-daughter dynamic is shaped by Lopez’s character resurfacing in Zoe’s life. The screenplay gives the two characters a bit of time to communicate some of the things they had imagined wanting to say to each other. ... Despite the promise of the film’s second half and the entertainment value of watching Lopez fight through every imaginable obstacle to protect her daughter, the film feels unexplored to its full potential. Large gaps in the story leave more questions than answers, for instance, regarding why the threats posed to these characters operate on such relentless levels.

Owen Gleiberman of Variety calls The Mother “action filmmaking made basic,” but he seems to fall in line with the other critics when it comes to the leading actress, who Gleiberman says deserves better. In terms of JLo, he continues:

She shoots, she stabs, she chops windpipes, she motorcycles down stone stairways in one of those chase-through-an-ancient-city action scenes (this one takes place in Havana), she tortures a man by punching him with a fist wrapped in barbed wire, she grimaces in muscle-torn agony but mostly looks frozen and implacable. Even more important, she puts her own spin on those familiar motions.

Peter Travers of GMA Culture says Jennifer Lopez (and all of the mothers out there) deserve better, given this movie’s dopey dialogue and nonsensical plot. The critic points out that watching JLo kick ass is absolutely the main draw, saying:

It's hard to find any reason why these former lovers of Mother, whose taste in men needs a serious rethink, would raise armies to destroy her other than Lopez is a star and it's fun to watch director Niki Caro (Whale Rider, Mulan) set up this Latina powerhouse to mow down the bad guys like sitting ducks of macho ineptitude.

The critics overall seem disappointed in The Mother , but it sounds like Jennifer Lopez’s performance might make this worth watching anyway. The movie is available now for those with a Netflix subscription , so feel free to check it out for yourself! You can also take a look at our 2023 Movie Release Schedule to see what’s coming to theaters soon.

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Heidi Venable is a Content Producer for CinemaBlend, a mom of two and a hard-core '90s kid. She started freelancing for CinemaBlend in 2020 and officially came on board in 2021. Her job entails writing news stories and TV reactions from some of her favorite prime-time shows like Grey's Anatomy and The Bachelor. She graduated from Louisiana Tech University with a degree in Journalism and worked in the newspaper industry for almost two decades in multiple roles including Sports Editor, Page Designer and Online Editor. Unprovoked, will quote Friends in any situation. Thrives on New Orleans Saints football, The West Wing and taco trucks.

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After watching a couple thousand action films, I started The Mother , and it finally happened. Jennifer Lopez’s character chases a villain that would make Hank Quinlan blush. The man puts out a solid forearm and knocks over a sweet-looking nun dressed in crisp all-white friar and Cornette.

It’s that type of thriller that combines the sensibilities of female-led revenge thrillers like Peppermint and Lou that equals nothing more than another retread that studio executives call original. Most shockingly, it comes from Niki Caro, the director of The Whale Rider.

The mother (2023) review and plot summary, is the 2023 film the mother worth watching, the mother (2023) ending explained.

Lopez plays “Mother,” a former military operative and veteran of back-to-back tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with forty confirmed kills and an accurate sniper rifle from at least 1,300 meters away.

Just after her last military operation, Mother went to work for Hector Álvarez (Gael García Bernal) and Adrian Lovell (Joseph Fiennes), illegal arms dealers who utilize her talents.

However, Mother wants out, and she is nine months pregnant. She tries to strike a deal with Special Agent Cruise (Omari Hardwick) and Williams (Edie Falco) to enter witness protection.

However, after her former employers find her location, she is almost killed. Mother then must give up her child for adoption and enter protective custody. She hides in Alaska with the help of her former commander, Jons (Paul Raci).

That’s the carrot, now here’s the stick — twelve years later, her old employers locate her missing daughter, Zoe (Lucy Paez), and use her as a pawn by kidnapping her in order to draw Mother out. With the help of Cruise, they travel overseas to rescue the daughter she never knew.

It’s almost shocking how inept and eye-rolling the material is here, considering the talent involved in this mess. Besides Niki Caro going for a straightforward payday, the script is written by some of the most talented blockbuster writers working today.

The original story was from Lovecraft Country’s Misha Green , who developed the script, along with Andrea Berloff, who wrote Straight Outta Compton . Then, inexplicably, The Batman , Top Gun: Maverick , and The Town scribe Peter Craig took a swing and missed wildly.

What went wrong? Well, the material is recycled. The writers fumble over any sort of theme that comes with vulnerable populations and animal rights. The plot is as obvious as they come, which comes across as bland and even pointless.

The story is a practically rudderless existence since the final two acts repeat themselves in vastly different settings.

At the very least, Lopez holds her own as an action star and gets back to her days in Enough , but the movie has very few thrills. The material is bad here. The villains are so over the top and give off the fun vibe that they’re so bad. And the booby prize goes to Fiennes. I’m not sure what he did to be stuck in a film like The Mother.

The star of films like Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth is cartoonishly menacing with little room to make the role interesting.

The Mother is a bad action-thriller with a good Jennifer Lopez wasted in the role. The story is a dull, stagnant, and futile exercise in streaming content.

There are much better films to stream on Netflix with strong and intelligent action heroes, like Kate and Gunpowder Milkshake . The Mother is worth watching with your mom on Mother’s Day if you are looking to enact some sweet revenge after a childhood filled with abuse and neglect. If you are a fan of mind-numbing, female-driven revenge thrillers like Peppermint and Lou , the Niki Caro film fits that description all too perfectly.

Is Hector Zoe’s father?

The question of whether Hector is Zoe’s father is never answered clearly by Mother. In the movie, the script states that Mother dated both arms dealers, including Adrian and Hector Álvarez. However, when Alvarez’s henchmen kidnap Zoe, the question is raised.

Mother and Special Agent Cruise can rescue Zoe, but Alvarez corners her with a gun and asks if the little girl is his. Mother replies, “Does it matter?” She ends up killing him to escape.

The Mother (2023) (Credit – Netflix)

Is Adrian Zoe’s father?

Whether Adrian is Zoe’s father is never answered directly, but there is enough evidence to conclude he is, in fact, the father. This all despite stabbing Mother in the stomach with a large, sharp knife to kill her and her unborn child. For one, at the 57:31 mark, Adrian attempts to kidnap Zoe after her initial rescue and holds her head in his hands lovingly.

At the 38:17 mark, Mother arranges for Hector and Adrian to work together. She challenges him that he cannot dance as well as Hector in a flashback, where Adrian then grabs her ass. She tells Cruise she became pregnant, which hints at Adrian being the father. It should be noted, though, at the 40:52 mark, Mother means Cruise that Zoe is not either’s, only “mine.”

What did Mother try to make a deal with the FBI?

After becoming pregnant, Mother discovered that Hector and Adrian were not only smuggling weapons but had also become human traffickers. Suspecting that there was more going on than just moving guns, she checked Adrian’s shipping crates.

In the first crate, she only found assault rifles in wooden boxes, but she heard coughing and whimpering coming from another container. Upon opening it, she found dozens of neglected children. Mother called the authorities and tried to strike a deal

How does Mother save Zoe?

Mother saves Zoe from Adrian in Alaska by shooting him in the head with her sniper rifle while trying to drive away from him. After being bitten by a wolf puppy, Mother takes Zoe to a clinic but gives the doctor her real name. Mother knows Adrian will be shown that information because it was put into a public database.

Mother leaves Zoe with her former commander, who lives nearby, but Zoe escapes and returns to Mother. Adrian’s associates then capture Mother, but after killing a dozen or so bad guys on snowmobiles, Mother gets her back. Adrian holds Mother at gunpoint, but Zoe shoots at both of them, trying to defend her biological parent.

The bullets, however, are packed with salt, which is used to scare away wolves.

Adrian is injured but grabs Zoe and throws her into a truck. From a couple of football fields away, with her arm injured, Mother takes a shot, killing Adrian and saving Zoe after the car stops.

Does Mother regain custody of Zoe?

No, Mother does not regain custody of Zoe. After rescuing her, Mother returns Zoe to her adoptive mother. However, the Mother rents an apartment where she can watch Zoe play outside at school. One day, Zoe stops skating and looks up at the apartment window, making a fake rifle-shooting sound with her mouth and hands.

Mother touches her heart, revealing a bracelet with the word ‘mom’ on it

What did you think of the 2023 Netflix film The Mother? Comment below.

RELATED: Who Plays the Daughter in The Mother?

Article by Marc Miller

Marc Miller (also known as M.N. Miller) joined Ready Steady Cut in April 2018 as a Film and TV Critic, publishing over 1,600 articles on the website. Since a young age, Marc dreamed of becoming a legitimate critic and having that famous “Rotten Tomato” approved status – in 2023, he achieved that status.

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Roku 2023 executive pay: ceo anthony wood dips a bit to $20.2m, media chief charlie collier gets a fraction of the prior year’s bonanza, ‘the mother’ review’: jennifer lopez in niki caro’s tough-as-nails action movie that strikes the right balance.

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Lopez is a killer of a mother, and no doubt a mother killer along the way; she admits — or perhaps boasts — that she knocked off 46 people while on duty in the Middle East, and is not someone to ever back down and do any less than kick her opponent’s ass. That said, she is understandably obsessed with her daughter Zoe, but ultimately unduly so as far as the FBI is concerned; when the agency tells her that the only way to protect her child is to disappear, she obediently agrees, disowns the child, and takes off for Alaska.

But you can bet that The Mother is not just going to just give up and live with the polar bears for the rest of her life. Sure enough, the baddies kidnap the daughter (Lucy Paez), now 12 years old, from a school playground, after which the next stop is, of all places, Havana, a location that is doubled extremely well by an urban area of the Canary Islands.

The Mother is under constraints of one kind or another most of the time, but you know she won’t remain so for too long. As it enters its final laps, The Mother ultimately becomes the female bonding film it’s been threatening to become nearly from the beginning, and it’s a hard-earned goal in almost every respect. The story is something close to a fairy tale transformed into a contemporary hard-action melodrama with a very long arc. But fanciful as it all is, the toughness of the characters and the film’s grave but propulsive energy keeps the proceedings almost always intriguing and one’s expectations in a constant state of curiosity as to where this might all end up.

Lopez is a coiled wire that sets the tone for this tautly and tightly wound tale. Nothing that’s achieved by the characters here is easy and sometimes requires indefinite amounts of patience and fortitude. Lopez and Caro seem very much in sync as they relate the sprawling tale in a disciplined manner that maintains interest and curiosity, if not high levels of downright excitement. The filmmakers avoid cheap thrills and gratuitous violence that, in other hands, might have made this story possibly more popular with viewers. But Caro holds the reins tight and has keenly told a peculiar story that will likely stick in the mind.

Title: The Mother Distributor: Netflix Release date: May 12, 2023 Director: Niki Caro Screenwriters: Misha Green and Andrea Berloff and Peter Craig Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Joseph Fiennes, Lucy Paez, Omari Hardwick, Paul Raci, Gael Garcia Bernal Rating: R Running time: 1 hr 55 min

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DVD & Streaming
Action/Adventure

Content Caution

In Theaters

Jennifer Lopez as The Mother; Lucy Paez as Zoe: Joseph Fiennes as Adrian: Omari Hardwick as Cruise; Gael García Bernal as Hector; Paul Raci as Jons

Home Release Date

May 12, 2023

Distributor

Movie review.

She hasn’t lived an easy life.

She hasn’t always made the best choices.

But her life and her choices have shaped her into the skilled sharpshooter and soldier she became. They’ve also led her to where she is right now: alone in a tiny cabin in the middle of nowhere with a letter in her hand and another choice to make

Some 12 years back, she was probably at her lowest point. She’d just come out of having affairs with two very bad men named Adrian and Hector. She was pregnant by one of them and surrounded by mostly belligerent FBI agents at a safehouse. (One was nice. He offered her water.) They only knew her as “The Mother,” and she was fine with that. For she had a dark story of illegal arms deals, human trafficking and murder to share. And the less the agents knew about her , the better.

But The Mother didn’t get far into her story before Adrian’s thugs—or maybe they were Hector’s men—hit the little safe house. They ripped into the place with military precision and slaughtered the agents as quickly as the men could draw their weapons.

Only she and a single agent survived—the nice one. And that was because of her quick wits and savvy choices.

The Mother’s child, a daughter, was born just after that brutal firefight. But she was compelled to give her up for adoption. It was the only way to assure the girl’s safety.

So she made a deal with Agent Cruise, the FBI agent whose life she saved. He agreed to keep tabs on the girl. And he promised to send a message if the girl was ever in danger. Only Cruise knew where The Mother was hiding. Only Cruise ever mailed her there.

Today she received a letter. And today The Mother has another choice to make. Will she stay hidden away where she is? Or will she go to the girl—an innocent who has never known her—and help her with all the skills acquired through years of hard living and difficult choices?

A mother can tell you, sometimes there is no choice.

Positive Elements

The story’s protagonist made an adoption plan for her daughter, Zoe. She believed that was the only way to insure her anonymity and safety. And, indeed, Zoe now appears to be part of a solid family. But when Hector and Adrian eventually discover the young girl’s identity, that forces the biological mom and daughter together.

The Mother isn’t exactly a model parent, but she does work tirelessly to protect Zoe. And she helps train the girl to take care of herself in dangerous situations. As painful and difficult as their pairing is (for both of them) they eventually grow to care for each other, their mutual affection growing throughout the story. “These have been the best months of my life,” The Mother tells Zoe by the end of their time together.

Zoe’s adoptive mom can’t blaze away at baddies to protect her daughter, but she is no less ferocious and protective. She fights for Zoe in the moment of the kidnapping. And she does whatever she can with authorities to assure her daughter’s safe return.

Ultimately, The Mother walks away with the knowledge that her child is part of a secure and loving family.

Spiritual Elements

When The Mother gets to Alaska, she meets with a former military acquaintance who volunteers to help her adjust to her new world. However, upon noting changes in her demeaner, he asks: “You find god or something?” The Mother assures her that she hasn’t.

We see a statue depicting an angel carrying a cross.

Sexual Content

In flashback, The Mother makes note of the fact that as she was coming out of the U.S. military, she chose to have affairs with two different men as a means of connecting their corrupt international dealings and assuring her future. Even she seemed to be unsure of which man fathered her child.

Violent Content

Hector grabs The Mother angrily and threatens to torture her sexually, “with no safe word.” He then talks of his arousal at the idea of this torment. One of Hector’s thugs kidnaps Zoe. And he tells The Mother that Hector plans to sexually abuse her. The Mother discovers a large shipping container filled with children and women being sent off to a human trafficking ring.

As you might have gathered by now if you’ve seen the trailers for this Netflix actioner, The Mother is a very intense film full of heavy military-style thumping and bloody shooting. Thugs and agents are shot in the head and body. An explosion badly burns a man’s face and sets a building on fire. Men are also chased, beaten, crushed by vehicles, sent flying by explosive mines and stabbed. A man’s gaping abdomen wound is pasted together with superglue.

The Mother unleashes her sniping skills on numerous occasions, usually with explosive, high-caliber headshots that splash blood on walls and windows. She also shoots deer and wolves in the woods near her Alaskan cabin. Upon capturing a thug with important information, The Mother beats the man repeatedly with barbed wire-wrapped fists. She also waterboards the guy and eventually kicks him over in anger. Someone’s neck gets impaled on a shard of glass.

The Mother teaches 12-year-old Zoe how to attack with a sniper rifle, a shot gun, a handgun and a knife. The girl eventually applies those practiced skills. She shoots someone with a shotgun, and she stabs a man with a knife hidden up her sleeve. But none of her attacks are lethal. Zoe is also dragged around and manhandled repeatedly by large men. And she’s bitten by a young wolf.

The Mother gets pounded and beaten misogynistically. Her face is bloodied and bruised. She’s stabbed in the stomach while pregnant. After one fall, her shoulder is dislocated, and she must painfully force it back into joint by ramming it up against a large rock.

Crude or Profane Language

The script includes two f-words, along with multiple uses of “b–ch” and “a–hole.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

Hector has bottles of booze scattered around his room. One of his thugs snorts cocaine.

The Mother smokes cigarettes. And when Zoe attempts to pick up that habit, The Mother slaps the cigarette out of her hand, telling her not to do it.

Other Negative Elements

The Mother does whatever it takes in the spur of the moment to achieve her goals. That includes stealing a motorcycle and hitting an innocent man in the face with a helmet before stealing his car.

They say you should never get between a mother and her cubs. And that’s especially true if that angry mamma can also hit you from 1500 meters away with a bullet from an M-24 sniper rifle.

That’s the thrust of The Mother , a film that’s reminiscent of many past actioners and one that stars Jennifer Lopez in the role of the tough-as-nails mommy at its core.

In fact, this pic feels a bit like two action movies in one. The first half is mostly blazing-fast combat that cements the protagonist’s skillset bona fides. The second half is about a mother and her young daughter bonding and building to a slam-bam movie finish.

Over the top? Of course. That said, it’s also a taut story that emphasizes unconditional love and self-sacrifice. It also makes some nice statements about adoption.

Of course, I can’t let you go without circling back to my opening statement about a mom who can effectively splash someone’s brains on the back wall from a great distance. Because that is what will spatter your screen throughout this film. Bloody headshots. Slashed jugular gushes. Pregnant belly stabs. Flesh-crisping explosions. Gaping wounds. It’s all here and more. Add in a several obscene language potshots, and this pic’s R rating is well merited.

I should also note that if you show this flick to the cubs, well, Mom will justifiably growl.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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Movie Review – The Mother (2023)

May 12, 2023 by Robert Kojder

The Mother , 2023.

Directed by Niki Caro. Starring Jennifer Lopez, Joseph Fiennes, Omari Hardwick, Gael García Bernal, Paul Raci, Lucy Paez, Fahim Fazli, Michael Karl Richards, Saif Mohsen, Yvonne Senat Jones, Link Baker, Jesse Garcia, and Edie Falco.

While fleeing from dangerous assailants, an assassin comes out of hiding to protect her daughter she left earlier in life.

In what feels like a cross between standard assassin fare and an episode of Jerry Springer (RIP), the opening moments of director Niki Caro’s The Mother (appropriately releasing on Netflix in time for Mother’s Day) sees Jennifer Lopez’s unnamed titular mother character under investigation by federal authorities inquiring about the whereabouts of criminals Adrian and Hector (played by Joseph Fiennes and Gael García Bernal) who she was brokering an arms deal between. The Mother is also pregnant, and the baby is potentially one of theirs.

This movie is consistently ludicrous and for the wrong reasons. After refusing to give any information, claiming that what Adrian and Hector are up to goes beyond a firearms deal, assassins storm the interrogation room picking off federal agents one by one, with Mother saving all but one before Adrian stabs her in the stomach, but not before she fights back, the building goes up in flames, and the film flashes forward to the baby safely born under distressing circumstances. Naturally, it is not safe for her to care for this child, but fortunately, the man she saved, Cruise (Omari Hardwick), confusingly feels indebted to her despite her being somewhat responsible for placing his life in danger in the first place andensures that Zoe (a name that the corny screenplay by Andrea Berloff, Peter Craig, and Misha Green emphasize means life) will go to a good family.

Of course, there is some resistance from Mother, who awkwardly uses her murder skills to justify being a suitable guardian. Following that, she lives off the grid for 12 years hunting in Alaska, and receives a picture of her daughter every year. Unsurprisingly, Adrian and Hector locate Zoe (played by Lucy Paez) to bring Mother out of hiding, sending her on a violent mission to protect her daughter at any cost.

Nothing is memorable about the globetrotting action sequences (such as a foot chase across Cuban streets that is smashed with cuts every half a second) or the generic villains with a predictable sinister ulterior motive involving children (that shockingly is dropped because the film has to focus on one girl and this specific mother-daughter dynamic). Once Mother is reunited with Zoe, she again goes off the grid, this time bizarrely chiding her daughter for being emotional towards animals while encouraging her to hunt and teaching her how to use firearms; plenty of questionable things, not always in the name of self-defense. Strangely enough, it also doesn’t matter who the father is or what Mother had with any of these men; it’s all just a series of contrivances for limp action.

To be fair, the idea is not bad; video games such as the recent God of War continuations have successfully dealt with violent parental figures who don’t know what else to teach their offspring and struggle to do right by them. However, The Mother is essentially a playbook for how not to do a similar story, as it lacks natural dialogue and a human element outside Jennifer Lopez’s physically gritty turn as a fierce protector.

Aside from a late action sequence in a snowfield that leads to a somewhat exciting one on one final battle, Jennifer Lopez is far and away the best element, but she is let down by a movie that is supremely terrible in every other aspect. The script alone is beyond saving and contains characters who do or say whatever pushes the plot forward rather than believably engaging with one another dramatically. Jennifer Lopez and Lucy Paez try to generate that connection, but The Mother is too emotionally inert for their efforts to mean anything. The mostly dull action doesn’t help anything.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Mother’ on Netflix, a Jennifer Lopez Action Vehicle That Skids Too Far Off the Road

Where to stream:.

The Mother (2023)

Jennifer Lopez

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Jennifer lopez sets the record straight on ‘the view’ after alyssa farah griffin asks about her matching valentine’s tattoos with ben affleck: “we did not” , sydney sweeney savvily shows off her scream queen chops in ‘immaculate’, stream it or skip it: ‘the greatest love story never told’ on prime video, the documentary portion of jennifer lopez’s three headed, heart-shaped media blitz.

In the true spirit of Mother’s Day, this weekend we get Jennifer Lopez gunning down a bunch of faceless bad guys in The Mother (now on Netflix). She also has A Moment with a mother wolf, you know, one of those moments where you lock eyes with a four-legged snarling anxious dangerous predator, and you both nod in unspoken acknowledgment of your shared instinct to protect your offspring at any cost. J-Lo is a credited producer of this ridiculous and violent genre outing, and teams up with director Niki Caro, who you’ll recall broke through with 2002’s Whale Rider and most recently showed some rock-solid action-movie chops via the battle sequences in 2020’s live-action Mulan remake. The Mother is the type of movie Stallone would’ve headlined in 1989, save for the feminine angle, which, fingers crossed, hopefully gives it a bit of depth. Let’s find out.

THE MOTHER : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: DAWN. AN FBI SAFEHOUSE IN INDIANA. A character only known as The Mother (J-Lo) is an informant on an arms deal and she’s telling the living shit out of the FBI agents that the bad guys know where they are and they’re coming and some of them are gonna die and that’s exactly what happens. This nasty-nasty named Lovell (Joseph Fiennes) backs her into a shower stall and this is when there’s a very highly dramatic reveal: She’s pregnant. Oh man. And how nasty-nasty is Lovell? He whips out a knife and stabs her right in the abdomen. But he can’t finish the job because her improvised explosive goes WHOOMP and burns half of Lovell’s face off.

Now, I’ve already tipped my hand with regards to what kind of movie this is, but this is the turning point, the tone-setting stretch of film that determines where it lands on the absurd-o-meter. The Mother awakens in the hospital. She’s OK. Her baby daughter is OK. And Lovell – well, he’s going to return with a mottled eye and really cool spiderweb of scars on his mug. Absurd-o-meter: we’re at about an 8. Edie Falco walks into the hospital room and informs The Mother that she’s far too wanted by the bad guys to keep the child, and here’s what she’s gonna do. She’s gonna sign the paperwork giving the girl up for adoption and then she’s gonna disappear and her days as a mercenary sniper assassin cold-blooded damn killer are over, and that’s that. She’s not happy about it but she takes one last look at the baby through the nursery window and we cut to her getting off a boat in Moosescat, Alaska. She holes up in a cabin and a subtitle reads 12 YEARS LATER and she’s still there.

Per the agreement, The Mother has been getting photos and updates on the girl. She’s been palling around with her pal and fellow war vet Jons (Paul Raci of The Sound of Metal ) and also killing her own food, so we know her shooting skills haven’t waned. Might she need them for any reason beyond hunting? Hmm. And wouldn’t you know it, just when she thought she was out, you know the rest. The bad guys are planning a heist, and The Mother’s daughter Zoe (Lucy Paez), who’s very happy with her adopted parents and sneakers with the skates in the heels, is the haul. The Mother and FBI guy Cruise (Omari Hardwick) get to work, chasing the villains – Gael Garcia Bernal turns up as one of them – all over hell and yonder to get Zoe back. The Mother shows what’s inside her when she tries to get the girl’s location by pummeling a thug with barbed wire wrapped around her fist. Donald Rumsfeld would be thrilled to learn that her controversial interrogation technique works, and she extracts Zoe and takes her to Alaska, where she trains the kid to shoot and stab and appreciate her fresh rabbit stew. Meanwhile, the girl shows a remarkable ability to not freak out about the fact that her birth mother is an utterly humorless badass slayer of men. There’s no time for psychotrauma when there’s several more action sequences to work your way through!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Mother is Taken meets the snowmobile chase in xXx meets the awesome lady action of Salt or Haywire .

Performance Worth Watching: Lopez hasn’t been this feisty since Enough . (She was even more feisty in Hustlers , but that movie is on an entirely different level than this genre fare.) Too bad the screenplay here is so thin and disinterested in character nuance, because she does her damnedest to give The Mother some depth when she has the rare opportunity to do so.

Memorable Dialogue: Jons sums up The Mother: “A woman like that – you gotta pay attention to what she does , not what she says .”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: The Mother shows no ambition beyond being a collection of action set pieces strung together by a sloppy plot that really wants to be about the Protective Power of Momhood, but is far more invested in shootouts and chases. The lock-eyes-with-the-mama-wolf stuff is played dead-serious, and it ends up being deadly unintentionally funny. Same goes for the sequence in which The Mother apparently read ahead in the script so she’d know exactly when the bad guys would re-snatch Zoe, allowing her to skid into the frame on a Harley Fat Boy just in the nick. Style trumps sense every time – and although Caro’s muscular style exhibits moments of flair and vibrancy, it’s not savvy enough to distract us from this murky, slapped-together story.

So what we’ve got here is a boilerplate action saga starring J-Lo as a tanktop-ballcap-and-aviators asskicker who never smiles ever and is capable of gritting her teeth and slamming her shoulder into a rock to pop it back into the socket. What, they couldn’t fit in a scene where she cauterizes her own bullet wound with a hot knife or some gunpowder and a lighter? This movie is uncompromisingly silly, unbelievable and incredible in the sense that you won’t believe a second of it and none of it is credible, from the psychological contents of its characters to its abdication of the laws of physics.

The screenplay introduces and disregards supporting characters with abandon, gives Fiennes very little to do as the villain and renders our protagonist a boilerplate cliche of an action hero with one dangling thread of vulnerability to tug on. She kills and kills and kills and shows no remorse, no inner conflict. But because she’s The Mother, and so fiercely devoted to being that, we’re essentially asked to ignore the fact that she’s a sociopath. In that sense, the film is a throwback to simpler times, when action heroes just did what they had to do and put their mental health in a jar and hid it in the darkest corner of the pantry. Granted, not every piece of entertainment needs to be a grandiose statement about the tragedy of the human condition, but I like to think we’ve elevated our standards for thematic content in movies – or at least enough visual wizardry and storytelling finesse to be an adequately entertaining diversion, which The Mother doesn’t quite achieve.

Our Call: And on top of that, The Mother just isn’t as fun as it wants or needs to be. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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The Mother Review: A Generic, Forgettable Action Movie

In The Mother, a new Netflix action movie, Jennifer Lopez's character is willing to do whatever it takes to get her daughter back.

It wouldn’t be the summer season without a plethora of action movies to hit streaming and theaters around the country, and Netflix is prepared this year to start its summer releases with The Mother . Jennifer Lopez continues her streak of appearing in action movies and leads the film as the main character, The Mother, with a smaller supporting cast consisting of Joseph Fiennes, Omari Hardwick, Gael García Bernal, and Paul Raci, just to name a few of the key cast members.

Kiwi director Niki Caro helms the film; she previously directed the live-action adaptation of Mulan for Disney in 2020. With a screenplay written by Peter Craig, Andrea Berloff, and Misha Green, The Mother aspires to add another entry into the female revenge story, but it's a weak addition. The movie was officially announced back in 2021 with Netflix distribution and Lopez and Caro attached to the project . Months later, filming began, with the slated release date being May 2023, although there were some bumps along the way – COVID-19 caused the production and filming to be halted with the outbreak of new variants in 2022.

Taking place in the United States, the remote regions of Alaska, and a tiny series of scenes set in Cuba, The Mother is ambitious , but regrettably fails to live up to the hype of its cast and safely lives inside the conventional tropes of the genre, especially when it comes to female vengeance and the stories that can be told with it.

An Assassin Tracks Down Her Missing Daughter

Jennifer Lopez stars in the movie as a character who simply becomes known as “The Mother.” In the opening scene, she sits in a suburban house, becoming an informant for the FBI about Adrian Lovell (Joseph Fiennes) and Hector Alvarez (Gael García Bernal), who she brokered an arms deal with in the past. When one of the agents dismisses her fears about how they’re following them, rather than the FBI tracking the suspects, agents are shot down one by one, and The Mother, cornered in the shower by Adrian and revealed to be pregnant, is stabbed in the stomach. When the house catches on fire, she survives by starting the showerhead and lying in the water.

However, when she successfully gives birth in the hospital, her daughter is taken away by the FBI. They reason that because The Mother is a target to Adrian and Hector, she would have a better life away from her mother. The Mother leaves one plea to the agent who survived the ambush, William Cruise (Omari Hardwick): she wants her daughter to have a boring, stable life, and she wants a card for every birthday that passes. She moves to Alaska after seeing her daughter one last time, and the years fly by. But when a letter arrives in the mail that’s not a birthday card, The Mother realizes something’s wrong.

She flies back to the mainland, and when she meets up with William, he tells her that Hector’s men had a picture of her daughter, Zoe, with them after a bust. The Mother heads to her daughter’s school, seeing her in real life for the first time since she was a baby, but this distant reunion isn’t meant to last–as The Mother watches her from a distance with a gun and binoculars, and is helpless as she watches a man grab her daughter and put her in the back of a van.

This kickstarts a new adventure that will lead William and The Mother to Cuba, where she must confront the literal demons of her past. A new set of problems emerges when she does meet her daughter, as neither of them is prepared to confront the reality and trauma that comes with being separated from a parent figure and daughter from the very beginning. At the same time, The Mother still has to deal with the consequences of her past, as she’s also being hunted down by the men she once trusted.

Related: The Best Action Movies With Female Leads

A Rehashed Female Revenge Narrative

If there’s one solid aspect about The Mother , it feels like a story that’s realistic for a woman character. Often women in assassin movies are delegated towards the classic tropes and are overly sexualized to fit a certain kind of audience, but Caro’s direction feels humane like Lopez’s 'Mother' is truly a woman who would do anything for her daughter. Her methods might be crass and a bit brutal at times, but she is realistic. She is on a mission, and no man is going to get in her way no matter how hard they are going to try and stop her. A lot of mothers can relate to those instincts when it comes to protecting their children.

However, the storyline of The Mother is one the audience may have seen many times before. At times the movie becomes reminiscent of its predecessors, like Jung Byung-il’s The Villainess , which was, in turn, inspired by La Femme Nikita . Many movies have touched upon the topic of vengeful women, and, in quite a few of these stories, their source of rage and vengeance stems from the fact they have a daughter. The Mother follows this formula, but the action moments aren’t enough to keep the plot going beyond the bare bones it already has.

Refusing to give The Mother a name boils her down to the core aspect of her motivations, making her nothing more than a mother trying to get her daughter back. The way she cares isn’t the typical way a mother is depicted in cinema and television, but she still loves her daughter and is willing to do anything for her. Despite how many flashbacks the film tries to conveniently give in order to explain her backstory, by the end she's largely still just characterized as a mother resorting to the tactics and violence ingrained in her to get her daughter back.

Although these flashbacks try to build emotional tension and a payoff that makes us want to care more about The Mother, they ultimately fail by the movie’s end. The villains’ reasoning for their narrative arcs is flimsy at times, and they do not get a moment to shine. Some connections are explained through these flashbacks, but others are left dangling, making characters exist only when they are convenient for the storyline. In the two-hour runtime, convenience seems to be a recurring theme throughout what crops up in the movie, especially as the bad guys come closing in for their final sweep and celebratory champagne.

Related: Jennifer Lopez's Best Performances, Ranked

Jennifer Lopez and the Acting Saves The Mother

Jennifer Lopez is the glue holding the movie together, and she succeeds in her mission. She oozes charisma on the screen and becomes the character, whether she is in the snowy fields of Alaska or attempting to take down one of the ghosts of her past in Cuba. Her chemistry with her daughter is supposed to be uneven, as when they meet for the first time, there’s obvious tension because they weren’t in each other’s lives up until this point. Lopez puts on a stoic face for the vast majority of the movie, and while this could easily anger the other characters, it makes sense why she is the way she is.

Acting overall is one of the movie’s biggest characteristics, because although quite a few characters are hollow and archaic, the actors manage to portray the characters decently. But there is only so much that acting can do for a script that needs work, and, in the end, the action isn’t enough to motivate genre fans. There isn’t anything special in the way things end up going down, and some of the largest fights in the movie are fairly anticlimactic in the way they unfold. Even moments that are supposed to be surprising, revealing plot points that are crucial going forward, seem to happen like a deep, drawn out sigh.

While the world needs to see more women in action films depicted realistically, The Mother fails in providing a captivating experience. It is predictable from the very beginning, and while there are some nice shots scattered throughout the cinematography department, some questionable decisions may have been made with editing the final cut of the movie. Perhaps in an alternate universe, if different decisions had been made with The Mother , it would’ve been a movie that broke free of the constraints and molds of the genre. But, in this universe, The Mother manages to become an action movie with characters, plots, and visuals audiences probably are already very familiar with.

The Mother was released on Netflix on May 11, 2023.

“Mother Play” review: Jim Parsons gives standout performance in predictable story

The new work by playwright Paula Vogel ("How I Learned to Drive") also stars Jessica Lange and Celia Keenan-Bolger.

First of all, it feels like we could’ve taken another crack at this title. A play about a mother and her relationship to her children, and it’s just called Mother Play ? There’s minimalism, and then there’s calling Moby-Dick “Whale Book.” This complaint isn’t incidental, but indicative of how the new work by esteemed playwright Paula Vogel excels in some aspects, but feels incomplete in other regards.

Jessica Lange stars as Phyllis, the titular mother, who has recently separated from her cheating husband when the play opens in 1964. The only other actors in the production are Jim Parsons and Celia Keenan-Bolger ( To Kill a Mockingbird ), who play her children Carl and Martha. Like all of us, Phyllis is a product of her time and place. Born to Depression-era parents in the South, she is deeply entrenched in early heteronormative expectations around marriage, family, and education (she was told by her mother that “the filthier a woman’s floor is, the higher her degree” in a pejorative way) even though Phyllis’ own experience with traditional marriage is her philandering husband leaving her to raise two children on her own. She’s so set in her ways that she can’t even imagine that her son (who dreams of being a regular at the Algonquin Round Table) and her daughter (who dresses in flannel and pants to avoid the unwanted attention of groping men on the bus) might have different ideas about life and sex.

The family’s poverty is depicted creatively by director Tina Landau: To mark their entrance into their new home, the stage opens covered in furniture, which the actors themselves move around and unpack. One of them even starts hidden behind a recliner, which makes for a delightfully dramatic entrance. That early apartment turns out to be infested, but Landau depicts the pests with creative shadow puppetry. It’s likely you’ll never be so pleased to see a roach in real life as the ones that show up here.

The subtitle of Mother Play is “A Play in Five Evictions,” and the story (which stretches from the mid-’60s to the present day) is structured by various moves in and out of different apartments. This helps mark the passage of time and the ever-changing nature of the familial relationships, but gets a little confusing when some happen in quick succession — and especially so when another countdown (the amount of martinis Phyllis drinks at a post-graduation celebration) suddenly enters the mix.

Parsons is the standout here. It’s awesome as always to see the actor use his post- Big Bang Theory security to be a prolific Broadway actor, and his performance is so funny, charming, and moving (look out for one riveting monologue where he explains his sexuality by imagining himself as Anastasia Romanov in the midst of the Russian Revolution) that you really feel his absence after Carl moves away to college and embraces the counterculture that Phyllis hates so much. Keenan-Bolger has the least flashy role, serving as narrator and emotional sounding-board for both of the other characters, but really gives the play its heart.

Lange is as good as you might expect playing an embittered aging woman pained by the way society has brushed her aside, but her performance isn’t powerful enough to justify some of Vogel’s creative risks. After Phyllis succeeds in alienating both her children for a time, there comes a scene that is just Lange alone on stage for several minutes, puttering around her apartment. It's obviously meant to illustrate the loneliness of this woman who wasn't given many choices in life and still can't help making the wrong ones over and over again, but it doesn't take long to make that point. The scene gets boring very quickly.

In addition to her years of teaching playwriting at Brown and Yale, Vogel is best-known for her Pulitzer-winning 1997 play How I Learned to Drive , which finally made it to Broadway in 2022 and remains unquestionably one of the very best works of recent American theater. That’s a hard standard to match, especially since the various twists and turns are almost impossible to predict when watching How I Learned to Drive for the first time. By contrast, Mother Play probably isn’t the first story you’ve ever seen about American parents failing to understand their children during the ‘60s and '70s. Some creative choices don’t pay off, but Vogel’s latest hits the emotional beats it needs to, and is certainly a powerful reminder to call your mom now and then. B–

Theater | Review: ‘Mother Play’ on Broadway stars Jessica…

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Theater | review: ‘mother play’ on broadway stars jessica lange in a playwright’s story of growing up.

Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jessica Lange in “Mother Play” on Broadway at the Hayes Theater in New York. (Joan Marcus)

NEW YORK — Playwright Paula Vogel has written a deeply personal play about life with one’s mother, and her late mom, Phyllis Rita, would surely have been delighted to have her Broadway appearance played by no less than Jessica Lange, an actress fully capable of turning her into a boozy but sympathetic hybrid of Mama Rose in “Gypsy,” Joan Crawford in “Mommie Dearest” and Tennessee Williams’ Amanda Wingfield.

Like Amanda in “The Glass Menagerie,” Phyllis has been abandoned by a man and is mostly disappointed in her children, in this case because they are both growing up gay. As a single mother of tenuous financial stability with little charm for landlords, Phyllis carts around Carl (Jim Parsons) and Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger) from one Washington, D.C.-area apartment to another in “Mother Play,” now at the Hayes Theatre, the home of Second Stage.

Fans of Vogel’s dark comedies across the years have met the lovably witty and sophisticated Carl before in “The Baltimore Waltz,” another personal Vogel piece that chronicled his death from AIDS in 1988, devastating his adoring sister. But in this most recent play, Vogel dives deeper into Carl’s impact on the artist as a young person, the way he functioned as a surrogate parent keeping Martha alive even as Phyllis spiraled from one problem to another, some of her own making, some not at all.

“Mother Play,” subtitled “A Play in Five Evictions,” rambles across several decades from 1964 to the present and it’s a measure of the superb acting in director Tina Landau’s production that you easily believe in the middle-aged Keenan-Bolger and Parsons being high-schoolers, just as you do the 74-year-old Lange as a woman in her 30s. The play is closely observed, drawing as it does on the things you tend to remember when you are a kid, such as your mother’s handbag and the treasures and horrors it contains, or the roaches on the fridge door, or the wild mood swings where you live.

I don’t think the “five evictions” set-up fully works, especially toward the end, and you never fully grasp all of the relevant personal and economic circumstances of this struggling family, seen through a glass darkly, as it were. But Landau’s direction fills these apartments with vibrant life and the play ultimately comes off as a beautiful tribute to the late 20th century friendships between lesbians and gay men, the latter with their irony, humor and capacity for nurturing so cherished by the former as they made their way through an often unfriendly world. Never for a moment do you feel that everyone here is safe; this is a play about a childhood on the precipice of something a kid cannot fully know. Vogel never implies this is a good thing, but she shows us young characters who thrive nonetheless.

Jessica Lange in “Mother Play” on Broadway at the Hayes Theater in New York. (Joan Marcus)

Jim Parsons and Celia Keenan-Bolger in “Mother Play” on Broadway at the Hayes Theater in New York. (Joan Marcus)

Jim Parsons and Jessica Lange in “Mother Play” on Broadway at the Hayes Theater in New York. (Joan Marcus)

Keenan-Bolger and Parsons are veritable fonts of accessible vulnerability, which Landau expertly contrasts with Lange’s more elusive and stylized persona. It is as if Keenan-Bolger and Parsons have to fight to get into Lange’s play, which is very apropos of what Vogel is writing about here.

Especially when synced with the coming retirement of its producer, Second Stage artistic director Carole Rothman, “Mother Play” has the aura of a valedictorian effort, the completion of a canon by coming home, even a push for a confirmed spot among the greats of this era of American playwriting.

Vogel certainly does not shy from her admiration of Martha, her own self, especially in the final scene when she still visits and cares for a mother with dementia, whom the play has just shown us she has good reason to ignore. Some writers would worry about how that looked, but I suspect Vogel decided that was the truth of it and, well, it’s her mother’s play after all. And who could argue with that?

At the Hayes Theater, 240 W. 44th St., New York; 2st.com

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

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Entertainment | nfl draft: 49ers make two trades en route to defensive back green, offensive lineman puni, entertainment, entertainment | review: joanne arnow brings an exciting new voice to the screen, “the feeling that the time for doing something has passed” is deadpan and sardonic.

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By Jake Coyle | Associated Press

In writer-director-star Joanna Arnow’s “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed,” Ann (Arnow), a 30-something New Yorker, lies naked in bed with an older man, Allen (Scott Cohen), with whom she has a yearslong BDSM relationship. She tells him she’s grateful he only cares about his own pleasure.

“It’s like I don’t even exist,” she says.

Much is just out of reach in Arnow’s shrewdly perceptive and very funny new film. Love, certainly, is nowhere near Ann’s life despite a series of romantic encounters. Music is talked about — from Andrew Lloyd Webber showtunes to the team cheer from “A League of Their Own” — but seldom heard. In one scene during a tryst with a composer, Ann says her favorite soundtrack is “In the Act of Wishing for Love,” but she means “In the Mood for Love.”

Even Ann’s existential crisis doesn’t quite materialize in this unwaveringly sardonic portrait of millennial malaise. Her life plays out in a series of brief, crispy edited vignettes that jump between her drab work life and her extreme but equally drab sex life.

Obedience is pushed on her in both places, as are labels, most of which Ann quietly but not necessarily apathetically accepts. One partner (Parish Bradley) who instructs her to communicate in “a series of oinks” writes the lewd name he’s given her across her belly in marker. At work, an unseen HR gives her a new job title: “Clinical Media E-learning Specialist.” Which is worse is hard to say. After three years on the job, she’s given a one-year anniversary trophy.

How Ann feels about all of this isn’t always obvious, possibly even to her. Arnow portrays her much as she directs and edits the film, with a detached deadpan. Sometimes Ann pushes back. She tells her older lover that she’s not an Internet window he can open and close. But there’s also something in Ann that recoils against more sentimental encounters. Later in the film, she begins dating someone sweetly if naively romantic (Babak Tafti) who’s unfamiliar with the kind of bondage role-playing Ann is accustomed to. But his sweetness is more of a strike against him. Ann may be a victim of her modern, alienating environment, but she’s also a product of it.

Arnow, who also made the 2013 film “I hate myself :)” has often been compared to Lena Dunham as a generation-representing voice, for her willingness to bear all on screen and for her proclivity for autobiography. (Ann’s parents in the film are played by Arnow’s real-life mother and father, Barbara Weiserbs and David Arnow.)

But Arnow’s sensibility is much dryer and more satirical. Whether Ann can free herself of her circumstance is one thing, but Arnow, as a keenly insightful filmmaker, proves again and again that she has. How else can you explain the trenchant absurdity of the poem-worthy dialogue that runs through the film? A sexual partner whose first line is: “Thank you for forgiving me for mansplaining about L.A.” A boss who announces: “If you’re not on Spotify, you’re behind the times.” And Ann, who after debasing herself with her older lover, says, “The candles were nice,” only for him to reply: “There was just one candle.”

“The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed”

3 stars out of 4

Unrated , but contains adult nudity and language

Running time: 87 minutes

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‘mary jane’ theater review: rachel mcadams makes a moving broadway debut in amy herzog’s portrait of motherhood under duress.

The actress plays a single mother navigating an unforgiving healthcare system while caring for her sick child.

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In many ways, the role of Mary Jane, the single mother at the center of Amy Herzog ’s compassionate play Mary Jane , was made for Rachel McAdams .

The actress’ most notable characters include an acid-tongued high-school student ( Mean Girls ), a lovesick Southern belle ( The Notebook ) and a tireless investigative reporter ( Spotlight ), but last year she delivered a quietly moving performance in Are You There God ? It’s Me, Margaret , which marked a new turn in her understated style.

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Startling if morbid … Félix Bruzzone in Camouflage

Camouflage review – the dark past of Argentina’s dirty war detention centres

Author Félix Bruzzone fronts this haunting film about Campo de Mayo, where his mother was among tens of thousands of people who ‘disappeared’ under the dictatorship

T he dark past of Campo de Mayo, a military camp that once served as a vast detention centre during Argentina’s so-called dirty war , is excavated in Jonathan Perel’s haunting documentary. Following noted author Félix Bruzzone as he jogs alongside the infamous site, the film is structured around the writer’s run in which the past and the present entwine. His encounters with witnesses of the dictatorship’s atrocities show that history is far from dormant, but a living, breathing thing.

Having lived in the area, Bruzzone was only recently made aware of his family ties to the site. Abducted by the secret police and taken to Campo de Mayo, his mother was among the tens of thousands who “disappeared” under the military regime. This painful memory is mirrored by Bruzzone’s conversation with an archaeologist, who talks about the human bones buried under the base, as well as the lush vegetation that flourishes above ground. The juxtaposition is startling if morbid. Indeed, as an estate agent tells Bruzzone: in spite of the camp’s horrific legacy, the prices of nearby properties have steadily risen over the years.

At one point, Bruzzone roams through the landscape wearing a VR headset, which conjures 3D-images of the camp’s torture huts, now demolished. Invisible to the naked eye, the resurrected images are at once fragile and pregnant with meaning, pointing to the impossibility of fully representing past atrocities. At the same time, one sequence where Bruzzone talks with a young woman who sells the camp’s soil to tourists – which struck me as especially staged – turned out to be scripted, with the souvenir vendor played by an actor. Compared to other elements of the film, the transition between documentary and re-enactment is much less fluid. Perhaps this clumsiness is itself symbolic, signalling how the journey towards the past is far from a smooth progression, but instead full of gaps and stumbles.

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‘Unsung Hero’: God Himself Can’t Save This Uninspiring Faith-Based Drama

SAY A LITTLE PRAYER

Christian musician Joel Smallbone co-directed this biopic about his own hardscrabble family, who worshiped their way to wealth.

Jesse Hassenger

“I know what I believe,” says Rebecca Smallbone (Kirrilee Berger), a teenager defending her ability to write and sing pop songs, about halfway through the biopic Unsung Hero .

The audience has to more or less take her word for it, because while she will eventually become the Christian pop star Rebecca St. James, Unsung Hero doesn’t focus enough on Rebecca to give anyone a sense of her thoughts or feelings on much of anything. We’re left to assume that she simply shares most of her beliefs with the true subjects of the film: her parents, David and Helen. In the tradition of King Richard , where Will Smith played the cantankerous, determined, high-standards father of Venus and Serena Williams, the next step in biopic evolution apparently involves paying tribute to the parents who figure so prominently in certain success stories. This seems like a particularly appealing tactic for a faith-based movie like Unsung Hero . Call it Fifth Commandment Cinema.

Unsung Hero is Fifth Commandment Cinema without the benefit of Will Smith-level charisma to make the stubbornness and screw-ups go down easier. What it lacks in star power, it makes up for in astonishing levels of faux-piety and false modesty: Joel Smallbone, of the Christian musical act For King & Country, co-writes and co-directs a biopic starring himself, playing his dad David. As the movie tells it, David follows his dream as a Christian music promoter and, after taking a bath on an early-'90s Amy Grant tour (blamed vaguely on “the economy”), uproots the family and moves them to the United States to start a new record label with another artist. When they arrive, David learns that the deal has fallen through. Now the family is stranded in Nashville with a six-month visa, no jobs, and plenty of pressure to head back to Australia. David doesn’t want to give up, but he’s also not sure what to do next.

This may be why Smallbone plays his father with a constant expression of stricken nerves; with every new turn of fate, even some strokes of objectively fantastic luck, David looks as if he’s just learned that he was swindled out of his life savings. Facing a barrage of anti-Australian discrimination due to the family’s six children (with a seventh on the way) and alienating use of the word “knackered,” the Smallbone family—following a cross-country train trip so lengthy that Helen (Daisy Betts) appears to become several months more pregnant by the end of it—makes a go of it without a cushy music-industry job.

Relying on their faith and worth ethic, which is to say home-schooling and child labor, the family starts a lawn-care business to make ends meet. They also receive help from wealthy local couple Jed (Lucas Black) and Kay ( Candace Cameron Bure , also an executive producer). Various behind-the-counter wage workers may be framed as vaguely forbidding and judgmental, but the Smallbones can count on the gracious charity of the rich for a leg up.

To be fair, David eventually bristles at this help, because he bristles at nearly everything. Thankfully, Helen’s ability to read almost anything as a manifestation of God’s blessings more than compensates for David’s sad-sack weaknesses. (“It’s a miracle—it’s like some kind of sign we’re supposed to be here,” she exclaims about a note from her mother that, when inspected by customs officials, unexpectedly helps them get into the U.S. despite their intention to overstay their visa.) Through the family’s perseverance, their prosperity gospel comes true.

If you’re looking for insight into what fuels the music of Rebecca St. James or For King & Country, Unsung Hero seems to find any detailed depiction of artistry or creativity untoward. There is God-given talent, there is the faith to pursue it, and there’s a very long roll call of the family’s successes appended to the end of this slender quasi-inspirational story. It’s hard to glean much inspiration, for that matter, when the movie’s hardships start to feel a bit like poverty cosplay. While David’s parents’ financial standings aren’t specified, they seem plenty comfortable, and the movie never supplies a particularly strong reason that the family must stay in the U.S. after David’s job offer falls apart.

Doubtless there is some interesting combination of craft, grit, and calculation that goes into making mass-appeal Christian pop, and members of the real Smallbone family could probably speak to that. But the ones who made this movie have demurred in favor of honoring their father and mother. Here, it's hard to shake the feeling that it’s the feel-good inspo they’re after, not the songs.

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Michelle Buteau and Ilana Glazer in Babes (2024)

It tells the story of Eden who becomes pregnant from a one-night-stand and leans on her married best friend and mother of two to guide her. It tells the story of Eden who becomes pregnant from a one-night-stand and leans on her married best friend and mother of two to guide her. It tells the story of Eden who becomes pregnant from a one-night-stand and leans on her married best friend and mother of two to guide her.

Pamela Adlon
Ilana Glazer
Josh Rabinowitz
Shola Adewusi
Sandra Bernhard
Michelle Buteau
8 Critic reviews
74 Metascore
2 nominations

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