Babies Film Review: Ticking Every Box but One

Lauren Miller Rogen waited years for an urge that never came, and Anna Kendrick carries Babies, the warm, open film she made about it.

Annie (Anna Kendrick, of Woman of the Hour) and Aaron (Seth Rogen, of The Studio) have been together for seventeen years without ever deciding whether to have children. Their friends have kids. They like those kids. Their life together is good. Then their friend Eliza (Kate Berlant, of Maddie’s Secret) separates from her husband and moves in with her young daughter. Suddenly, Annie and Aaron get an extended look at what having a child might actually mean. Annie is also dealing with her mother’s Alzheimer’s, making the question of family feel even more complicated.

Lauren Miller Rogen knows exactly how personal that sounds because it is. A decade ago, a divorced friend and her four-year-old daughter moved in with Miller Rogen and Rogen for a year. She initially imagined the experience as a television series, but she didn’t know how her own story would end. Once she did, she wrote the screenplay quickly in early 2025 and filmed it that fall. The result doesn’t feel like a movie built around a thesis. It feels like someone finally giving all those uncomfortable conversations room to exist.

Kendrick is fantastic. Miller Rogen’s dialogue has the loose, slightly unfinished quality of thoughts arriving in real time, and Kendrick is remarkably good at getting that to sound natural. Annie isn’t written as the person who has all the answers. She’s a woman who keeps talking because she’s trying to figure out what she actually thinks. Kendrick makes every hesitation, joke, and moment of frustration count.

Rogen is warm and funny, although there’s an unavoidable feeling that he’s playing a version of himself. Given how autobiographical the story is, that isn’t exactly surprising. Still, I occasionally wished Aaron had been played by someone who could give us a little more distance. Kendrick is essentially playing Miller Rogen’s side of their real-life conversation, and she’s so good at it that the contrast becomes noticeable.

The supporting cast is stacked. Issa Rae brings both comedy and sincerity as Annie’s friend, who’s opening a gallery while pregnant with her third child. Berlant remains one of those performers who can walk into a movie and immediately make it more interesting. Dan Stevens plays Eliza’s estranged husband and, thankfully, uses his English accent without looking remotely ashamed of it. David Strathairn is dependable as Annie’s father, while Sharon Stone turns up as the wonderfully kooky woman he dates. Stone is so much fun that I kept waiting for her to return. She mostly doesn’t. That’s half a star right there.

The film looks as breezy as its California setting suggests. Edu Grau’s cinematography lets the bright homes, colorful parties and increasingly elaborate costumes create a life that looks enviable from the outside. Julie Berghoff’s production design and Danny Glicker’s costumes give the movie plenty of visual personality without making it feel like a catalog for people who own nicer furniture than I do.

Joi McMillon’s editing keeps the conversations moving, while Nami Melumad’s score knows better than to underline every emotional beat. That’s important because Babies doesn’t want to tell you how to feel. Miller Rogen’s script gives equal weight to people who want children and people who don’t, while refusing to pretend those choices are simple.

It isn’t a laugh riot. A few gross-out gags go further than they need to, and some jokes land with a thud. But there’s a real generosity in a comedy that lets people admit they aren’t sure what they want without making them villains, victims or punchlines. Miller Rogen turned a deeply personal question into something other people can see themselves in, regardless of which answer they eventually choose.

That’s the thing I like most about Babies. It doesn’t argue that there’s one right way to build a family. It simply understands that figuring out whether you want one can take seventeen years, a lot of uncomfortable conversations and, apparently, one very revealing houseguest.

Babies was screened at TIFF on September 12, 2026. will be released in US theatres on and in UK & Irish cinemas on