This iconic film of the post French New Wave era is a reflection of the libertarian spirit of the May 1968 student protests, and also a disillusioned acknowledgment of their failure. [Full review in Spanish]

| Feb 11, 2025

As a portrait of shifting sexual mores following the free love movement of the 1960s and a piece of personal catharsis, The Mother and the Whore remains a landmark of the era.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 16, 2025

It is a thoroughly European work, thoughtful, realistic, sophisticated, without any compromise for effect or condescension to the audience with eye-catching action or simplified explanations.

| Sep 24, 2024

It is a modern, anticipatory, influential film like few others, full of nuance and contradictions (in its own way it is revolutionary and conservative, playful and painful) and something like a generational portrait... [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 22, 2023

The film is designed to be a religious experience, but the musty answer it offers to the perils of sexual freedom is actually a denial of sexual freedom.

| Sep 21, 2023

Breaks the bonds of what a feature-length film is expected to do. As downbeat as it is, the film also laid out a path for personal, if not autobiographical, cinema that Mia Hansen-Løve, Philippe Garrel, Ira Sachs, and Arnaud Desplechin have all extended.

| Sep 8, 2023

A fitting epitaph for the French New Wave. It’s about children of the revolution adrift without a cause and emotionally ill-equipped for new freedoms they have no idea what to do with.

| Sep 5, 2023

Eustache’s film has other things on its mind in addition to the shifting morals of shiftless men and the women who love them in an age of disillusionment. There is a continual reference to cinema…

| Original Score: B+ | Aug 30, 2023

A teeth-gnashing portrait of anomie centered around a sensitive dirtbag, both trollish and tender...

| Aug 21, 2023

Jean Eustache obliquely puts on trail the self-reflexive cool of the early New Wave films.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 18, 2023

"...Jean Eustache’s immortal three-and-a-half-hour epic of sexual freedom and emotional bondage, now featured in a gorgeous new 4K restoration that, more importantly, features a subtitle translation that makes the film feel much more alive..."

| Nov 4, 2022

Eustache, in his tender and passionate depiction of their romantic roundelay, delivers nothing less than a comprehensive vision of France's post-1968 revolution-and it's a ferociously conservative view.

| Mar 27, 2017

Maddening and brilliant, confessional and slyly evasive, insistently perverse and blissfully naive.

| Original Score: 4/4 | May 22, 2014

The Mother and the Whore is a harrowing psychodrama of destruction.

| May 22, 2014

Three and a half hours long, The Mother and the Whoreis both epic and intimate, ethnographic in its cultural detail and subjective in its exposure of the raw nerves of body and psyche.

| May 22, 2014

A classic that remains as burningly alive and shocking today as it was in 1973.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 22, 2014

Jean Eustache's monumental The Mother and the Whore... stands the test of time magnificently.

| May 22, 2014

Only towards the end does the running time weigh heavy, but by then you're hooked enough to care what happens.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 22, 2014

The film's brilliance lies in its reluctance to pass judgment on its characters, put them through some sort of arbitrary plot, or make them hit their marks.

| May 22, 2014

A sprawling study of sexual politics and smug 1960s intellectualism, Jean Eustache's masterpiece was the last hurrah of the French New Wave.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 22, 2014