It works from a specific place and lets audiences relate to that place, and the people in it, like trusted intimates.
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10/03/08
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Momma's Man (2008)
96 %
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Reviews Counted: 24
Fresh: 23
Rotten:1
Average Rating: 7.9/10
Consensus: Moody yet touching, Momma's Man successfully illustrates with elegant simplicity the struggles of a man consumed with his adolescence.
Theatrical Release: Aug 22, 2008 Limited
Synopsis: After a holiday visit with his parents, Mikey is headed to the airport to return to his wife and newborn baby. Except he doesn’t board the plane. Instead he returns to his parents’ loft in lower Manhattan, back to his childhood room that... [More]
Starring: Matt Boren, Ken Jacobs, Richard Edson, Piero Arcilesi
Director: Azazel Jacobs
Reviews for Momma's Man
Top Critic On the surface, it's a straightforward low-budget tale about a grown man who visits his parents and refuses to leave. Yet deeper, darker currents move through Momma's Man, eddying around fears of letting go on both sides of the generational divide.
09/19/08
Top Critic
Top Critic
Top Critic ...just when the film seems about to disengage us observing Mikey's morose return to the womb, something startling begins to happen.
09/14/08
Writer-director Jacobs is one of those rare filmmakers who forgoes conventional narrative in order to tell a story through the visual details of a world and the behavior of characters within it.
09/12/08
After a summer full of movies that celebrate the arrested development of their male characters, that titter and wink while grown men behave like teenagers, Momma's Man is a welcome palette cleanser.
09/07/08
Momma's Man, in its lovingly twisted way, [is] a valentine to great parenting.
09/04/08
Azazel Jacobs, the writer-director of Momma's Man, has done more than make another precious indie family quirkfest; he's created a true vision.
08/28/08
Top Critic A slow albeit riveting look at a 30-year-old married man who has regressed to childhood for a while.
08/25/08
Indie films about arrested adolescence have practically become a genre, but the way Jacobs avoids pat explanations...is so refreshingly low-key that it's easy to feel like Jacobs has reinvented the wheel.
08/22/08
A little miracle, Azazel Jacobs' lovely story of a life lost and found tackles big issues -- love, maturity, fulfillment -- in deceptively modest fashion.
08/22/08
Top Critic It's time to stop calling Azazel Jacobs a 'promising' filmmaker. With Momma's Man, Jacobs achieves the promise.
08/22/08
Top Critic A touchingly true film, part weepie, part comedy, about the agonies of navigating that slippery slope called adulthood.
08/22/08
Top Critic In his simple, minimalist way, Mr. Jacobs has fashioned the quintessential interior New York film.
08/21/08
An original and unsettling snapshot of parents wondering if and how to reach out to their child, and a man whose boyhood problems suddenly seem a lot easier than they used to.
08/21/08
For a young filmmaker whose previous movie, The GoodTimesKid, suggested he was a precocious talent, this moody, pitch-perfect ode to immaturity ironically proves he’s finally grown up.
08/21/08
Within its modest docudrama style, Momma’s Man addresses universal experience as presumptuously as does a mainstream Pop epic.
08/20/08
Much comic pathos arises from the realization that Mikey has no perspective on his parents. They are as mysterious in their idiosyncrasies as anyone's.
08/19/08
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