‘Tully’ Film Review: Charlize Theron Is a Real Mother in Bleakly Hilarious Parenthood Tale

Good parents do the best they can, and we forgive them when they make mistakes. Similarly, the parenting comedy “Tully” makes a narrative misstep late in the game — and it’s a spoiler, so I’ll talk around it — but the film is otherwise so intelligent, so uncompromising and so bleakly hilarious in a genuine way that it’s easy to overlook the errors and focus on the good times.

For their third collaboration (after “Juno” and “Young Adult”), screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman are determined to strip away the gauzy sentimentality so often used to portray motherhood in the media.