Mother and Child Reviewed at The Cinematheque

I have to admit I went into this film with thoughts of Lifetime/Hallmark channel sugarplums dancing in my head like little nauseous chick flick gremlins eating away at a brain full of Hawks and Welles and Ford and Mann and Scorsese and baseball and meat and other manly things.  (yea yea, I know, I love Musicals too, but let's keep with the manly-man image I am trying to build here!) 

Seriously though, I did expect a quite maudlin affair full of cloying cliches (insufferably so!), but what I got was a well-rounded film with a surprising amount of very un-Lifetime/Hallmark channel dancing sugarplummery (was that even a word!?).

Perhaps not the greatest film - it falters here and there, and here again - but it certainly comes as a rather refreshing surprise when all told.  And Annette Bening is simply remarkable in a role that could have easily fallen into the obvious and the pathetic.

Read my review of Mother and Child at The Cinematheque.