New Jennifer Lawrence Movie ‘Mother!’ Called ‘Grotesque And Nauseating’ Attack On Christianity


After months of speculation about their status as a potential couple, 27-year-old actress Jennifer Lawrence and 48-year-old Requiem For A Dream director Darren Aronofsky made their relationship “red carpet official” at the New York City premiere of their new flick, mother!. As Metro reports, the movie officially premieres in theaters nationwide on September 15, and has largely received rave reviews.

The film mother! is a dark, psychological thriller, and is getting a lot of love on online movie-review sites, such as Rotten Tomatoes (71 percent positive rating) and IMDb (6.8 out of 10 stars), and many critical and viewer reviews of the new film have been overwhelmingly positive. However, one film critic is not loving Jennifer Lawrence and mother!. As Fox News reports, Kyle Smith, of the National Review, has called the film an “attack on Christianity.” What’s more, Smith blasted mother! as being, perhaps, “the vilest movie ever released by a major Hollywood studio,” adding that viewers with “nervous constitutions or heart conditions, and anyone who happens to be burdened with good taste” and “pregnant women” might want to avoid the new movie, a movie he called a “stain on the reputation” of Paramount Pictures.

While other critics, reviewers and publications have been quick to call out parallels between the Bible and mother!, Smith didn’t hold back in denouncing the highly anticipated new Jennifer Lawrence film.

In addition to starring Jennifer Lawrence (launched to fame via her roles in The Hunger Games movies), mother! also stars Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Javier Bardem. According to Rolling Stone, the movie is comparable to Rosemary’s Baby with “Biblical allegory.” AP reviewers claim that mother! is tantamount to the Old Testament crashing into “modern anxiety.”

The New York Post called the new Jennifer Lawrence endeavor “terrifying,” agreeing that comparisons to the Bible and other religious texts are “easy enough to pick up” so long as viewers know that they’re liberally sprinkled into the film. However, according to Kyle Smith, the allegory, similes and metaphors went way, way too far. Indeed, Smith believes that Darren Aronofsky and Jennifer Lawrence’s latest movie is little more than a “grotesque and nauseating” attack on modern Christianity.

Warning: Potential spoilers ahead.

While Smith had few good things to say about mother! or Jennifer Lawrence, the critic’s overwhelmingly negative review of the new film seemed to be mostly based on the final 30 minutes. According to Smith, the first half of the movie plays like “the world’s longest Saturday Night Live sketch,” while the climax is more akin to a “grotesque spoof of the Nativity.”

“To experience the final half-hour is to understand what it must feel like to be a clump of broccoli in a Cuisinart.”

In his review, the critic bemoans Lawrence’s fate, claiming the starlet is “utterly befouled and degraded” in the movie’s final scenes. Smith went on to add that the movie served no purpose, aside from being little more than “a Biblically-infused version of torture porn.” Ouch.

While the single National Review review of mother! doesn’t seem to have turned Jennifer Lawrence’s fans off or prevented them from seeing the movie, there has been some speculation that Christian backlash to the film could rival that which dogged Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988. That movie would go on to be banned in multiple countries. So far, negative reviews of Jennifer Lawrence in mother! haven’t substantially lowered its overall online rating.

This isn’t the first time that Jennifer Lawrence has ruffled conservative feathers recently. In the last week, she raised eyebrows and ire by suggesting that recent massive hurricanes Harvey and Irma may have had something to do with “Mother Nature’s wrath” over the election of Donald Trump as president.

The film mother! starring Jennifer Lawrence, opens September 15 and has been rated R by the MPAA.

[Featured Image by Dennis Van Tine/STAR MAX/IPx/AP Images]

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