Roger Ebert Review - "Casa de los Babys" ***
"Casa de los Babys" gets its title from a motel in an unnamed South American country where American women wait while the local adoption process slowly matches them with babies. "They're making us pay for our babies with the balance of trade," complains the always-critical Nan (Marcia Gay Harden) as the days and weeks go by. The women shop, sunbathe, go out to lunch and gossip about one another, and we eavesdrop on conversations that are sometimes cynical, sometimes heartbreaking.
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New York Times Review, Stephen Holden
...Ms. Harden's extraordinarily rich performance digs under the character's abrasive surface to suggest the childhood traumas that hardened her and have put her at risk of inflicting the same abuse on the next generation. Nan is the token Ugly American in an otherwise sympathetic ensemble that finds Maggie Gyllenhaal, Daryl Hannah, Susan Lynch, Mary Steenburgen and Lili Taylor, who play the other mothers-to-be, near the top of their games.
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Entertainment Weekley Review, Owen Gleiberman
... It says something that the most obnoxious character in ''Casa de los Babys'' is also the most vivid: Marcia Gay Harden as an angry vulgarian who steals shampoo off the maids' carts and bribes a lawyer to get her baby. Sayles may not have planned it this way, but Harden makes crassness as powerful as any maternal instinct.
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