Regissøren Margherita har stålkontroll på filmsettet, og gjør det slutt med en av skuespillerne sine for å skille jobb og privatliv. Da moren innlegges med hjerteproblemer, bidrar brorens ro til hennes panikk og stadige mareritt, mens arbeidet lider. Samtidig ankommer en hårreisende selvsikker amerikansk leading man blottet for talent, replikkminne og språkøre.

"Take me back to reality!", brøler John Turturros perfekte karikatur til regissøren som søker tilflukt i filmen. Forhandlingene mellom fiksjon og realitet, jobb og familie og drøm og våkentilstand utgjør kjernen i Nanni Morettis selvbiografiske studium av hvordan kunst skapes i kontekst av skaperens private følelsesliv, her formidlet på hudløst vis av Moretti-gjenganger Margherita Buy.

Bergens Tidende: "Varmt, vittig og rørende om livet, filmskaping, sorg og selvbilde."
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Stavanger Aftenblad: "Italienske Nanni Moretti har laget en vakker film om å miste sin gamle mor, full av ironi mot ham selv som regissør."
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Ny Tid: "Italienske Nanni Moretti er tilbake med sin beste film siden Sønnens rom, som den premieraktuelle metafilmen Mia madre har flere likhetstrekk med."
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P3/Filmpolitiet: "Et varmt og rørende drama om å miste sin mor."
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Dagbladet: "Veien er viktigere enn målet i Nanni Morettis underholdende og uhåndgripelige "Mia Madre"."
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Aftenposten: "Nanni Moretti har laget en både gripende og frustrerende film om en kvinnelig filmskapers midtlivskrise."
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Adresseavisen: "Den mest personlige filmen til Nanni Moretti siden "Sønnens Rom"."
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"Nanni Moretti's Mia Madre is warm, witty and seductive: his best film since The Son's Room, returning him to the themes of cinema, life, family ties and family guilt, though given here a gentler and more lenient view. He even playfully reprises another signature image: a motor-scooter. a girl is taught to ride one by her nervy middle-aged parents.

Mia Madre is partly a movie about the business of making a movie, and realising that. however chaotically real and pressing this all is as a job. movie-making is an evasion of the outer reality, the real reality, which closes in from all sides. Despite the Roman setting, it is closer in spirit to Truffaut's Day for Night than, say, Fellini's 8 ½.

A director is midway through shooting a high-minded, if slightly schematic social-realist strike movie with the stirring and solidarity-minded title of Noi Siamo Qui (We Are Here); about factory workers staging a sit-in, protesting against the new owner's planned layoffs. The director herself is Margherita (Margherita Buy) who is supremely calm, competent, but distracted; she is divorced from the father of her teenage daughter and now breaking up with her latest boyfriend, an actor in her movie. and for all her imperturbable and quietly-spoken sophistication, she is doing this with a certain imperious insensitivity.

But she must manage this situation with a growing crisis: her elderly mother Ada (Guilia Lazzarini) is in hospital, and Margherita is in denial about the increasingly grave situation. It is her brother Giovanni (played by Moretti himself), on a leave of absence from his own workplace, who is doing most of the heavy lifting involved with visiting her. The strike-style "morale" banners that some patients' relatives hang up outside the hospital remind Margherita subliminally of the placards in her movie, and she is plagued with cinematically vivid bad dreams about her personal history, from one of which she awakens to a domestic situation in her flat which she (and we, the audience) at first think must be a bad dream as well. So she has to go to live in her mother's apartment, where she grew up, and the memories bring her close to a kind of hidden or unacknowledged breakdown.

Brilliantly, Moretti allows the audience to assume that Margherita's mother is a little placid old mamma, and it is her children Margherita and Giovanni who are the first-generation prosperous intellectuals. But then Moretti challenges this assumption by having Ada remark that here in hospital, "the older you are, the dumber they think you are, when actually it's the opposite: you know more". But it is not merely natural wisdom: Ada is in fact a retired teacher of classical literature, a formidable and fastidious scholar whose substantial personal library is one of the things which torments and oppresses Margherita in the apartment: she feels she has to encourage her daughter Livia (Beatrice Mancini) to learn Latin.
Furthermore, Moretti creates a second resonance within his style: tired and exasperated Margherita has to be a mamma figure to her big, spoilt, lovable baby of a lead actor. an American star called Barry Huggins, wonderfully played by John Turturro, who like Moretti has found his best form in years. Barry is charming, effusive, childishly excited about being in Rome: keeping his indulgent hosts up late talking and drinking, boring them all with his reminscences of working with Kubrick, whose demands led him to miss the birth of his son. This preposterous anecdote actually has its echo in a heart-wrenching moment in the film's final moments. There is a hilarious sequence in which Barry has to drive a car in one scene: should the car be mounted on a truck, or should Barry actually try to drive a car, with lights and camera dangerously mounted on the windshield so that he is actually in danger of crashing? It is an uproarious metaphor for the dangers involved in making one's life in the cinema.

There is a subtle, unstressed feminist note to the movie: both Margherita and her mother Ada have or had jobs which in academia and film-making (still pretty conservative in their gender politics) are assigned mostly to men. I wonder if Moretti might not actually be gender-switching a personal or autobiographical experience: a male director dealing with the death of a mother, and relating to the sister who is the one doing a lot of the hospital visiting. Well, no matter. Mia Madre is a tremendously smart and enjoyable movie.
(Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian)

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