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What's different about this film is that it holds together better than Brooks' other movies. And in the end, it's somewhat sweeter. [17 Jan 1997, p.21]

Mother finds Brooks in top form as he dons the tri-fold hat of director, star, and writer (with co-writer Monica Johnson). His humor has more of an observational zing than a jokey, one-two patter. Within this structure, Brooks uncovers many of the fidgety truths about the relationships between parents and their grown children. The film comeback of Debbie Reynolds is also a most welcome offshoot of this movie.

Brooks, who co-wrote (with Monica Johnson) and directed as well as stars, is much too smart to settle for the obvious gags and payoffs. All of his films depend on closely observed behavior and language, on the ways language can refuse to let us communicate, no matter how obsessively we try to nail things down. In his scenes with Reynolds, they are told quietly, conversationally; they're not pounding out punch lines, and that's why the dialogue is so funny.

The best reason to see Mother is the deliciously off-kilter performance of Debbie Reynolds, who speaks in pure honey-sweet tones yet keeps planting tiny seeds of disapproval, using her maternal ”concern” as an invisible form of warfare. You never quite catch her doing it; the character doesn’t even know she’s doing it. She just is who she is, and by the end you realize that that’s her glory.

Admittedly, Mother has a weak beginning and ending, but the material in between is what makes it worth watching. This probably isn't the funniest or most inventive comedy of the year, but it gets high marks in both categories.

Brooks brings vast reserves of quarrelsome, hairsplitting hilarity to the story of a man going mano a mano with his sweet little mom.

In Mother, Brooks has essentially made the missing psychiatrist scene of Modern Romance into a feature. There’s no doctor, mind you, and the character’s string of failed marriages is barely dramatized. But the thrust of the film is frankly therapeutic.

There aren't many films which tackle the generation gap between middle-aged kids and their old folks with such unsentimental comic acuity - and Reynolds essays her best role in three decades with delectable good grace and charm.

Mother is a relationship comedy, like Woody Allen's films, and it screams for the smart, elastic pacing that Allen creates. The situations are funny -- 40- year-old John moves into his old bedroom, goes shopping with Mother, is shocked that she has a boyfriend and occasionally curses and smokes -- but his poor timing flattens most of those scenes.

With this marvelous premise to launch it, the film fails nevertheless. The trouble is that none of the dialogue is funny enough to fulfill the expectations that Brooks' full-bodied stand-up comedian delivery promises every time he opens his mouth.