Review: Xavier Dolan's Vibrant, Intoxicating, And Illuminating 'Mommy'

This is a reprint of our review from the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.

We remember watching a directors' roundtable one day and the question was asked of the assembled filmmakers "what is the hardest part of directing?" They all agreed that the hardest thing was to create a sense of life: inside a frame where everything included therein is a choice, the hardest thing is to make it feel part of a wider world, unmanufactured, organic, alive. They should maybe just hang around mopping up the spillover from "Mommy," the tremendous new film from Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan, because, by some distance his best film, it is also one of the most vibrant, intoxicating, illuminating films of this or any Cannes, and it's a little like we can still feel it thrumming through our veins.

Centered on an incredible performance from Anne Dorval, with whom Dolan reunites after "Laurence Anyways" and a no less revelatory one from Antoine Olivier Pilon as her son, the...