Two very different films landed in the same September window, and the critical reaction couldn’t have been more lopsided. Bassam Tariq’s Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, a hitman drama starring Mahershala Ali, premiered at TIFF to some of the best reviews of the festival. Meanwhile Practical Magic 2, a legacy sequel reuniting Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman nearly three decades after the original, opened wide to reviews ranging from unenthusiastic to outright brutal — despite debuting at No. 1 with roughly $28–29 million. Here’s what critics actually said about each film, and why we think the gap deserves a more skeptical look than critics have been willing to give it.
What Critics Actually Said About Each Film
The praise for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother has been strikingly consistent. Variety called it an “exhilarating fusion” of family drama, faith inquiry, and action filmmaking. The Playlist called Ali’s performance one of the most captivating of his career. Collider went further, calling it one of 2026’s best movies, and AwardsWatch handed it a B+ out of TIFF.
Practical Magic 2 got a rougher ride from largely the same outlets. Variety’s Todd Gilchrist called it an “overlong, predictable sequel.” The AV Club gave it a D-. SlashFilm rated it 4 out of 10. Even the kinder reviews — the Daily Beast and Time Out both landed on “cute” — read as polite rather than enthusiastic.
Our Take: The Consensus Doesn’t Hold Up
We’ll say plainly what a lot of the wall-to-wall praise for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother hasn’t: this looks less like independent critical judgment and more like a festival press corps arriving at the same talking points at the same time. When outlet after outlet lands on nearly identical language — “exhilarating,” “captivating,” “one of the best of the year” — for a film with real, unresolved problems, it’s fair to ask whether critics are actually disagreeing with each other or just reinforcing a consensus that formed in the festival lounge before anyone had time to sit with the movie. The wall-to-wall praise asks you to watch this film, not to think about it — and once you stop and actually think about what it’s depicting, the story underneath the action is worse than the reviews let on.
Strip away the action sequences — which are genuinely well-executed — and what’s left is a story that pretends to a moral and spiritual seriousness it doesn’t actually earn. The film wants credit for grappling with faith, grief, and fatherhood, but its emotional beats are engineered rather than earned: it leans on a crying infant, a dead mother, and a devoted father to manufacture sympathy for a man who is, underneath all of it, a professional killer. That’s emotional manipulation dressed up as depth, and critics who normally push back on that kind of shortcut have mostly let it slide here.
The bigger issue is the film’s actual moral architecture. The closest thing this story has to a genuinely good person is its antagonist, Pastor Yoon — the one character trying to stop the sex trafficking of young women, an operation run by a relative of Latif’s. And yet Latif, our supposed hero, still does business with that same trafficker: in one scene he approaches him and asks about one of the women being used in pornographic films, because she’s lactating and he wants her breast milk for his own baby. The film treats that as a small, almost incidental beat in Latif’s fatherhood arc. It is not incidental — and the scene gets more uncomfortable still, since Latif’s description of the woman is prompted by the fact that his own young son had already seen her. That the film routes this moment through a child at all, rather than treating it as something to be shielded from him, is its own indictment of how carelessly the story handles the women at its margins. A film that can casually route its hero through a trafficking operation for his own convenience, while positioning the man trying to shut that operation down as the villain, has a much bigger problem than pacing or a muddled ending — and it’s a problem critics have largely declined to sit with.
And it doesn’t stop there. The film also asks us to root for the trafficker’s relative himself — the young man Latif ultimately tries to protect and redeem — with nothing in the script actually earning that redemption. There’s no real turn, no moment where he demonstrates he’s capable of being anything other than what he already is. We’re simply told, through Latif’s devotion to him, that he’s worth saving. Audiences are being asked to root for someone who is compromised at every level, on the strength of the hero’s say-so alone. That’s not moral complexity; it’s a shortcut. And it’s the same shortcut running through the whole film: critics are asking us to watch with our eyes and leave our brains switched off, because the moment you actually think about who this story asks you to root for and who it asks you to write off, the whole thing falls apart.
That storyline is the film’s most morally serious idea, and it gets buried so Latif can remain sympathetic. The women being trafficked become a plot device rather than the point. That’s not a small storytelling choice — it’s a reflection of a broader pattern we see constantly in film and media, where women who actually need saving get pushed to the margins of someone else’s redemption story. A film that had the courage to sit with that idea instead of using it as backdrop would have been the more interesting movie. Critics praising this film as spiritually serious while barely mentioning that choice suggests they weren’t looking as closely as the reviews imply — or didn’t want to.
None of this means Practical Magic 2 is a great film — by most accounts it isn’t. But it’s worth noticing that a legacy sequel gets picked apart for structural repetition while a film with a genuinely unresolved moral center gets a pass because it’s dressed in prestige-adjacent trappings: faith, grief, TIFF, an actor overdue for acclaim. That’s the kind of asymmetry that starts to look less like independent judgment and more like critics agreeing to be impressed together.
Practical Magic 2‘s box office success — a No. 1 opening that ended Spider-Man: Brand New Day‘s six-week reign — is a real commercial win regardless of how critics scored it, and audiences have responded to it far more warmly than the reviews suggest they should have. That disconnect between what critics say and what audiences actually respond to is worth paying attention to on both sides of this comparison.
The post Are Critics Overpraising Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother? Our Take on the Disconnect With Practical Magic 2 first appeared on Movie Reviews. TV Coverage. Trailers. Film Festivals..