Synopsis
After finding a lump in one of her breasts, Magda goes to visit her doctor who gives her bad news: she needs a mastectomy, preceded by severe chemo treatments. While she ponders this ill fortune at a soccer game where her son Dani participates, she attracts the attention of talent scout Arturo, who is looking for talented young players to enroll them in the junior leagues.
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Cast
- Penélope CruzMagda
- Luis TosarArturo
- Asier EtxeandiaJulián
- Teo PlanellDani
- Silvia AbascalChemotherapy Nurse
- Àlex BrendemühlRaúl
- Anna JiménezNatasha
- Jon KortajarenaHandsome Man #1
- Ciro MiróHandsome Man #2
- Miguel MotaICU Doctor
Recommendations
- 67
The Film Stage
The craft is quite admirable, while the elements feel a bit recycled. - 58
The A.V. Club
Ma Ma’s corny simplicity makes its many flourishes look excessive, and even desperate. - 50
Observer
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. - 50
RogerEbert.com
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. - 42
IndieWire
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. - 30
The Hollywood Reporter
Cruz’s aces performance apart, very little about this extremely disappointing film feels real, and some of it is risible. - 30
Screen Daily
There is an undeniable cheesiness to the closing stage of ma ma that makes it hard to take entirely seriously. - 30
Variety
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.
