Faye Dunaway gives a startling, ferocious performance in Mommie Dearest. It’s deeper than an impersonation; she turns herself into Joan Crawford, all right, but she’s more Faye Dunaway than ever.

| Sep 18, 2023

There is nothing to sympathize with but the sets, which get far too many drinks spilled on them.

| Dec 7, 2022

Lacking psychological intelligence or, for that matter, awareness of Hollywood sociology, Mommie Dearest is just a collection of screechy scenes further distanced by convictionless direction.

| Dec 11, 2018

The flaws aren't the story with this unusual film. The story is in the powerful, vivid and emotionally draining scenes of torment and conflict between a mother and daughter.

| Apr 27, 2018

"Mommie Dearest," the film version of Christina Crawford's poison-pen memoir of her adoptive mother, Joan Crawford, looms as wretched excess.

| Oct 4, 2017

The character is rendered such a grotesque, its moments don't accumulate to an arc or even a readable profile. They just pile up, like cars in a traffic accident, and all we can do is gawk.

| Oct 15, 2016

By all accounts, Miss Crawford had serious failings as a mother, but the film pounds so unrelentingly on her raging cruelty to her children -- and her equally offensive public sweetness -- that she emerges as a laughable caricature.

| Jul 6, 2010

It's rich, stimulating thought in spite of itself.

| Oct 30, 2007

Director Frank Perry, who collaborated with three others (including producer Frank Yablans) on the script, gives it all a certain crazed conviction.

| Oct 30, 2007

Dunaway does not chew scenery. Dunaway starts neatly at each corner of the set in every scene and swallows it whole, costars and all.

| Oct 30, 2007

Really no dafter, perhaps, than some of Joanie's own Warner Bros melodramas; the trouble is, it thinks it's Art.

| Jun 24, 2006

Perry and Yablans fuse this formal schizophrenia with the cruelly episodic structure and fetishized period details of Hollywood biopics.

| Original Score: 4/4 | May 31, 2006

I can't imagine who would want to subject themselves to this movie.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Oct 23, 2004

There is nothing to string the episodes together into a coherent drama, and no insight into Miss Crawford herself.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 30, 2004