Isn't for the kiddies. It probably isn't for anyone not interested in the darkest corners of the human psyche.

Ma Mere, with its sun-drenched sense of dread and band of reckless, unlikable characters, isn't very good, but that doesn't stop the actors -- especially the intrepid Huppert -- from going all the way.

It's pretentious highbrow trash, but as far as that goes it works pretty well.

Director Christophe Honore's respectable, tightly coiled, but ultimately unrewarding adaptation of Georges Bataille's posthumous novel.

Can't transcend its own suffocating milieu.

Based on a novel by French provocateur Georges Bataille, an important thinker whose fiction rarely translates into good cinema.

For all its shocking content, it remains a rather conventional psychological portrait of Oedipal attraction taken to a disturbing extreme.

Ma Mère, while less prudish than Catherine Breillat's dour deconstructions of sex, is also less competent. It winds up making incest look absurdly swank.

Yet another stylish exercise in depravity in which Huppert floats through the sordid proceedings in a calm haze. If only the film she inhabits was as sexy as it aspires to be.

At first, Ma Mère is shocking and even alluring, but it doesn't take long for the conceit to wear thin, especially since the characters so rarely act as recognizable humans.

So clinically detached it borders on absurd.

Ma Mère may be ludicrous, but its cast displays a commitment that deserves more than grudging admiration.

If you are at all squeamish about incest and/or prefer sex scenes without violent undertones, you should avoid this movie.

This tale of disaffected sexual depravity is practically a parody of the worst of French filmmaking.