Metacritic-Rezensionen

The craft is quite admirable, while the elements feel a bit recycled.

Ma Ma’s corny simplicity makes its many flourishes look excessive, and even desperate.

A sensitive career-changing performance by luminous Penélope Cruz dominates the Spanish film Ma Ma, but there’s no escaping the fact that the rest of it is not much more than a dreary, tear-stained soap opera.

More important than the washed-out blue-tinged rooms, bleached white interiors and sun-blasted sea and sand is Cruz, who single-handedly breathes a sense of genuineness into this maudlin exercise even if she can’t cure all of its flaws.

Cruz is radiant in her role, finding inner strength even when the script pushes Magda towards blind hope, and finding pain even when Medem insists that cancer hits with all the force of a bad night's sleep.

Cruz’s aces performance apart, very little about this extremely disappointing film feels real, and some of it is risible.

There is an undeniable cheesiness to the closing stage of ma ma that makes it hard to take entirely seriously.

Julio Medem’s film is a smiling-through-tears saga whose generally tasteful execution can’t ultimately salvage a whopping load of maudlin contrivance, all designed to burnish the halo around St. Penelope.

Penélope Cruz is an Oscar-winning actress we don’t see often enough in prominent leading roles. So how disappointing to find her having to carry Julio Medem’s florid Ma Ma, a melodrama only glancing at profundity.

Falls flat on its face thanks to a severe lack of self-awareness and an air of dramatic self-importance.