Mothering Sunday
Sony Pictures Classics | Release Date: November 19, 2021 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
66
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 30 Critic Reviews
Positive:
18
Mixed:
12
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Original-CinJennie PunterApr 11, 2022
Mothering Sunday, which unfolds on one day in the 1920s English countryside, is an exquisite expression of the female gaze that sifts through the memories, reveries, and revelations of a writer and explores—in a story that captures “the whole feeling of life,” as one character puts it— how she became one. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleMar 28, 2022
Mothering Sunday is most likely a one-of-a-kind hybrid, a brilliant one-off. Read full review
90
Screen DailyWendy IdeJul 11, 2021
It’s a richly detailed mosaic of a movie which pays as much attention to emotional authenticity – a dull ache of grief which is the aftermath of the First World War and a smouldering yearning between the two lovers – as it does to the story itself. Read full review
83
The Film StageJared MobarakSep 11, 2021
Husson leads us through tiny moments building up an origin story of sorts for who Jane will become. These experiences and these observations become the basis of a book about life’s beauty and tragedy binding us in ways that transcend economic and social standing. Read full review
83
The PlaylistCaroline TsaiJul 11, 2021
A thoughtful if occasionally melodramatic reflection on the nature of grief. Read full review
80
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Anne T. DonahueApr 6, 2022
Triumphantly, Young’s work with her ever-changing (and aging) character succeeds in bringing a complicated and resilient character to life. Read full review
80
The Observer (UK)Mark KermodeNov 14, 2021
It’s the more deceptively restrained and poetic elements that strike home. Read full review
80
Time OutAnna SmithNov 4, 2021
Mothering Sunday isn’t exactly a cheery watch, but it’s an intelligent, affecting British drama with a splash of French sensuality. Read full review
80
The TelegraphTim RobeyJul 11, 2021
There’s so much distinction here, and maybe just a slight vagueness about theme as Husson nears the finish line: it’s a tough ask to end a film well which is so given over to memory, and this becomes a bit of a waft in the general direction of closure. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleSteve DavisApr 6, 2022
While the movie’s nonlinear construction is its selling point, at least for those moviegoers who prefer a bit of a challenge, an underlying vibe of melancholy gives Mothering Sunday thematic weight. Read full review
75
Paste MagazineBrianna ZiglerMar 23, 2022
While countered by a throughline which is a bit on-the-nose—that loss comes for us all, and that what matters is how we choose to live with it—Mothering Sunday still succeeds as a moving, beautifully crafted and sensual period picture. Read full review
70
VarietyGuy LodgeJul 11, 2021
Telling a story that advocates living boldly over not living at all, Husson has followed suit, opening up exciting new possibilities for her career in the process. Read full review
67
ColliderMaggie LovittApr 8, 2022
It’s not that Mothering Sunday is a bad film, it’s far from it, but it never reaches the echelons of true greatness that it should have been able to achieve with such a who’s who cast. Read full review
67
IndieWireKate ErblandSep 9, 2021
Mothering Sunday pushes toward cut-and-dried conclusions, sewing up certain storylines with a finality that doesn’t befit the early sense that nothing is really ever over for Jane or the wounded world she inhabits. Read full review
63
Movie NationRoger MooreApr 5, 2022
Whatever Mothering Sunday lacks in emotional payoffs, it’s the shattered tone that Husson gets across that makes it work. Few films have done as well at capturing the disorienting, utterly-deflating feeling of a grief everyone involved realizes they will never, ever get over, so there’s no sense even trying to talk about it. Read full review
63
RogerEbert.comKatie RifeMar 25, 2022
On an intuitive, sensual level, “Mothering Sunday” is intoxicating. As a story with plot and characters, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Read full review
63
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliMar 23, 2022
Beautifully filmed and emotionally on-target when confined to 1924, Mothering Sunday loses its way once unmoored in time and left adrift on the currents of the years to come. Read full review
63
The Associated PressJocelyn NoveckMar 22, 2022
Memory is selective, memory is jumbled, memory travels in different directions. And so does “Mothering Sunday,” Eva Husson’s affecting and visually pleasing — if languorous — meditation on love and loss, based on a woman’s memory of an impactful day that reverberates through her long life. Read full review
60
Los Angeles TimesRobert AbeleMar 24, 2022
It’s an unhurried reverie that’s sometimes as wonderfully sustained as a fermata but also occasionally stifling due to filmmaker Eva Husson’s dedication to that tonal approach above all else. Read full review
60
TimeStephanie ZacharekMar 24, 2022
The picture is a bit arty and decorous; it could do with fewer swimmy camera moves. But Young vests it with a fascinating, flinty grace. Read full review
60
EmpireIan FreerNov 12, 2021
Mothering Sunday just falls short of a great movie; a radical attempt to shake up period-picture staidness, shot through with strong performances, impeccable craft and a strain of sadness, but it’s never enough to tug vigorously at the heartstrings. Read full review
60
Film ThreatAndy HowellSep 13, 2021
Another problem with the film is the pacing. The main story is interesting enough, but it just feels padded and stretched. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawJul 11, 2021
It is a lovely-looking, lovely-sounding movie, handsomely designed, meticulously shot and impeccably performed — and it also has interesting things to say about the emotional toughness and the Greeneian splinter of ice in the heart, that is needed by a writer. But I have to admit that, despite my liking for slow cinema, I found something a bit indulgent and classy about the unvarying andante pace. Read full review
60
The Hollywood ReporterLeslie FelperinJul 11, 2021
Even the lush world-building of the visuals here, committed performances especially from Young, and stream-of-consciousness editing aren’t enough to conjure the wry, melancholy, and, above all, intensely literary interior voice of the book’s protagonist. Read full review
60
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangJul 10, 2021
It never quite comes together — the decades-spanning connective tissue somehow feels both overstated and thin — but Husson’s skill with actors, among them Colin Firth, Olivia Colman, Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù and the great Glenda Jackson, yields undeniable dividends. Read full review
50
Washington PostAnn HornadayMar 30, 2022
Based on a spare, exquisitely crafted novel by Graham Swift, this thoughtful but ultimately inert dramatization respects its source material and tries valiantly to give arresting visual expression to its finely layered themes. Read full review
50
The New York TimesA.O. ScottMar 24, 2022
Mothering Sunday never conveys the intensity of erotic passion, the ardor of creative ambition or the agony of grief. Even though it is ostensibly about all of those feelings, it handles them with a tastefulness that is hard to distinguish from complacency. Read full review
50
Slant MagazinePat BrownMar 23, 2022
For all of the film’s somberness, its depiction of an era of rigid class divisions and incalculable loss still comes through the hazy, soft-focus goggles of nostalgia. Read full review
50
TheWrapDan CallahanMar 23, 2022
The first hour or so of Mothering Sunday can be very enjoyable because Husson (“Girls of the Sun”) does not take what little narrative there is too seriously and instead dedicates herself to making O’Connor into the most attractive possible love object for her camera. Read full review
40
Little White LiesElla KempNov 22, 2021
There is pain worth immortalising in the stories of the past, and endless sadness found in a lonely woman’s quiet existence. Yet Mothering Sunday fails to look beyond what the outside world can see, in order to really excavate a truth to be remembered once the holiday has passed. Read full review
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