page_title: Mommy (2014 film)
section_title: Critical reception
hierarchical_section_title: Mommy (2014 film) / Reception / Critical reception
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Anne Dorval au festival de Cannes
context_page_description: Mommy is a 2014 Canadian drama film written, produced, directed and edited by Xavier Dolan and starring Anne Dorval, Antoine Olivier Pilon, and Suzanne Clément. The story concerns a mother with a sometimes-violent teenage son, struggling to control his behaviour in a hypothetical future in which parents have the legal option to commit troubled youth to public hospitals.
  The story focuses on mother–son relationships, a reoccurring theme in Dolan's work, and also marks his fourth collaboration with Dorval and his third with Clément. Inspiration for this particular story was drawn from Dolan's discovery of Pilon and the music of Ludovico Einaudi. It was shot in Quebec in an unconventional 1:1 aspect ratio.
  The film debuted at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize. It subsequently became a critical and financial success, grossing over $13 million worldwide. Mommy went on to win numerous other awards, among them nine Canadian Screen Awards, including Best Motion Picture.
context_section_description: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film received an approval rating of 89%, with an average score of 7.88/10 based on 127 reviews; the site's consensus states: "As challenging as it is rewarding, Mommy finds writer-director Xavier Dolan taking another impressive step forward". On Metacritic, the film holds an average score of 74, based on 34 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews" in accordance with the website's standards.
  In Canada, David Berry of the National Post gave the film four stars, writing, "As a movie, Mommy is a very similar thing to its namesake jewellery, a flashy, scary, gorgeous little piece of home, a shiny bauble that still manages to hang very close to the heart". Brendan Kelly of the Montreal Gazette gave it five out of five stars, calling it "the absurdly prolific young auteur’s best film yet" and "an ode to the strength of tough working-class single mothers everywhere", and praising Anne Dorval as "extraordinary". Brian D. Johnson of Maclean's credited Dorval for an award-worthy "powerhouse performance". Johnson saw Mommy as more mature than Dolan's previous I Killed My Mother, writing "the tables are turned" in writing the film from the mother's perspective. Peter Howell of the Toronto Star gave the film four stars, saying its smartphone-style picture made it timely and concluding it was "one of the best movies of the year, period". Liam Lacey at The Globe and Mail gave the film three stars, calling the introductory information about S-14 "clumsy", but added "What makes the flaws forgivable is Dolan's love of his characters".
  On 21 May 2014, Mommy received a four-star rating from The Guardian reviewer Peter Bradshaw, who described the film as "a splashy, transgressive treat, from trailer-trash chat to unexpected sex and surprising emotional depth".  Following Dolan's receipt of the Jury Prize at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, Guardian writer Xan Brooks introduced the film as "a boisterous Oedipal comedy". Peter Debruge of Variety called it "A funny, heartbreaking and, above all, original work". Mark Olsen of the Los Angeles Times wrote the film "feels like nothing less than Dolan's magnum opus, for the time being at least". Sandra Hall of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote that while she initially found there was "too much noise, too many emotional eruptions and too many tone-deaf subtitles", she found Pilon and Dorval's performances to be "remarkable". Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film three and a half stars, calling it rattling. The Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern, while finding the acting "powerful", found fault in the aspect ratio.  Richard Brody of The New Yorker panned the film, saying the depiction of Steve "has no basis in psychology; rather, it appears as Dolan's own pseudo-transgressive artistic tantrum".
caption: Anne Dorval received positive reviews for her performance and won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Actress.
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