While [Guillermo Del Toro] only takes an executive producer credit here on Mama, I doubt more involvement would have been helpful.

| Jan 14, 2021

Good acting can't forgive bad effects or narrative choices, and yes, there are a lot of those.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jan 9, 2017

Haunting and extremely atmospheric, Mama is a horror film imbued with an unsettling and affecting power.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 1, 2014

The problem is that [the] movie barely meets the minimum generic requirements, and thus comes off as pretentious for presuming to hover so airily above them.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 1, 2014

[The movie] has more integrity than its creepshow peers. The story basically comes down to a dead-looking woman who doesn't want to be a mother fighting for parental custody against a long-dead woman who does. (Grad students, start your theses.)

| Original Score: C+ | Aug 1, 2013

If you can swallow the porcelain Chastain as a tattooed bass player in a punk band, then the supernatural hooey will not seem in any way hard to believe.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 26, 2013

Extended from a 2008 short and starring Jessica Chastain, this has become a proficient, machine-tooled horror flick.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 21, 2013

Mothers, moths, myths - all seemingly thrown together by someone on meths.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 21, 2013

By splitting the action between several different characters and locations, the plot dissipates the suspense and lacks focus, as if it has been bolted together from disparate, ill-fitting pieces.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 20, 2013

Screenplay contrivances aside, it's as stylish and atmospheric as modern horror gets.

| Jan 25, 2013

Even if the beats are familiar, Muschietti sustains a remarkable mood throughout: wintry, elemental and stark, like a late Sylvia Plath poem.

| Jan 24, 2013

I was guessing right till the bitter, scary, transcendent end.

| Jan 21, 2013

Is this Chastain's reputation-besmirching Norbit? Pshaw -- for my money, it's her best performance yet.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jan 19, 2013

The metaphorical mother-child connection becomes a mystical horror show of significant power. Sadly it comes too late to save "Mama."

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jan 18, 2013

There's something eerily effective about juxtaposing childhood innocence with the violent, the supernatural, the deranged. Evil shines all the more brightly when held up against the sweet promise of youth.

| Original Score: B+ | Jan 18, 2013

Chastain has an excellent time. And so did I, for most of the movie: It's much more suspenseful than violent, being careful not to allow us to figure out Mama too quickly.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 18, 2013

There's something dead and rotting at the center of "Mama," and it isn't the ghost of the woman who lends the horror film its title.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 18, 2013

[A] respectable entry into the horror genre that values chills over kills.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 17, 2013

"Mama" is skillfully made, and although Chastain is the best thing in it, she's not the only thing in it.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 17, 2013

This is a picture about how a mother's love can be nourishing at its best but suffocating in the extreme. Chastain embraces that idea wholly, without squeezing the life out of it.

| Original Score: B- | Jan 17, 2013