“Mothers’ Instinct” gets by on its pulpy potential more than anything else.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 16, 2024

The movie that is is disappointingly bloodless, cold rather than chilling, with a payoff that isn’t shocking so much as an admission that we’ve spent 90 minutes we’ll never get back.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 15, 2024

It is slickly made and thoroughly entertaining, flamboyant flourishes and all. But it seems that, with a few minor exceptions, no one really knows what to do with movies like it anymore.

| Jul 31, 2024

The characters in Mothers’ Instinct have no convincing inner lives at all, but the exterior work of the actors playing them is choice stuff.

| Jul 29, 2024

The misconceived but morbidly entertaining Mothers’ Instinct is far too slapdash to respect the seriousness of its premise, but at the same time also far too serious to indulge in the campiness of its plot.

| Original Score: C+ | Jul 26, 2024

Spiked with twisted turns, explosive emotions, and a feud that's frightening and fun to behold, it's a thriller well worth its gnashed teeth and salty tears.

| Jul 26, 2024

Benoît Delhomme’s 1960s-set directorial debut can’t decide whether it wants to be considered camp or not, awkwardly pitching itself between a somber drama and antic melodrama.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 13, 2024

Beyond a handful of clever lighting choices, that bathe these women in an interrogatory spotlight, Mothers’ Instinct looks beautiful but ultimately feels sterile.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 3, 2024

This is Anne Hathaway doing another enjoyably overcooked period drama.

| Apr 2, 2024

A film about two immaculately groomed women gaslighting and goading each other to the point of madness should be a lot more fun than this.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 1, 2024

If Todd Haynes had directed the same cast in the same (fabulous) costumes, with the same screenplay and the same camera set-ups, Mothers’ Instinct could have turned out a copper-bottomed masterpiece.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 29, 2024

The fatal mistake with this film... is that it takes itself so drearily seriously and seems to think it’s offering an incisive critique of mid-20th century patriarchy, or some such.

| Mar 29, 2024

It is of course pleasurable to watch Chastain and Hathaway trying to out-psych each other, but the plotting here is slight to say the least.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 29, 2024

This is a film unlikely to find much love in the mainstream — the feelings invoked are so discomforting, so wildly out of kilter with Hollywood’s current emotional palette.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 28, 2024

The movie doesn’t even pretend to have anything to say about parental bereavement, or repressed feelings, or Stepfordy wives. Its purpose is purely to entertain and it does that nicely enough, without outstaying its welcome.

| Mar 28, 2024

Watching Chastain and Hathaway sparking together as equally matched antagonists is a joyous experience. It’s like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? or Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Heat.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 27, 2024

“Mothers’ Instinct” doesn’t breathe: It hasn’t the grandeur of great melodrama, nor the savoir-faire of great noir. Like its mismatched heroines, it’s constantly, twitchily figuring itself out, as we sit tight, intrigued, tensely waiting for it to trip.

| Mar 27, 2024

When the curtain rises on the third act, it is time for some very ripe and silly overacting and homicidal machinations which are wince-making in the wrong way.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 27, 2024

Susan Sontag famously defined camp as “a seriousness that fails”. Where does that leave failed camp? Exhibit A: the duffness of Mothers’ Instinct...

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 26, 2024

Sophisticated, adult thrillers are few and far between, and Mothers’ Instinct fills the void admirably. With vivid, striking imagery and top-notch production design, the film paints an exciting, moreish portrait of psychological intrigue.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 25, 2024