mother!

"I'd put Darren Aronofsky alongside Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson and Martin Scorsese as one of the finest American filmmakers working today. His latest, however, is more like a David Lynch film: something challenging to decode that'll be hugely rewarding to some and simply frustrating to others."

"Most of the dialogue and effects are clunky, repetitive, second-rate. A minute or so of David Lynch's latest Twin Peaks series has more irrational menace. For all its feverish activity, Mother! feels static."

"By all means, go to "mother!" and enjoy its roller-coaster-of-weird exhibitionism. But be afraid, very afraid, only if you're hoping to see a movie that's as honestly disquieting as it is showy."

"Grappling with this climax - steeped in gore, religious symbolism, hundreds of marauding strangers (including Kristen Wiig) and sheer chutzpah - is the moviegoing gauntlet of the year."

"Mother! escalates the anxiety and ups the ante of dismay with every scene, every act, every trimester, taking us in short order from WTF to WTAF to SWTAF and beyond."

"Whatever you say about the ending, you can't call it an anticlimax."

"Certainly not for the faint-hearted."

"A very Rosemary's Baby-like intimate horror tale that definitely grabs your attention and eventually soars well over the top to make the bold concluding statement that, for some creators, art is more important than life."

"A dense, delirious, playful and serious work of capital A art, and easily the most ambitious film to come out of a major studio since Kubrick."

"Like all our most vivid bad dreams, it snags the mind. With barbs."