At one point, his mother runs away to the cemetery where her husband is buried, as one critic later put it, "to see the grave site that awaits her, one stone among a million in that vast necropolis gazing on the city's distant skyline from the shadow of the BQE.

"[3] Chiarina Barile, who plays Al's elderly mother, was discovered by Engel while she was sitting on the stoop of a New York City apartment building, and died soon afterwards.

"[3] Writing in The New York Times, film critic Bosley Crowther praised the "exquisite and isolatedly eloquent little bits in Mr. Engel's picture."

He said of Lindfors' performance that "everything she does—every movement, every gesture, every reaction, every lift and fall of her voice — is so absolutely right and convincing that the style drapes most fitly around her...She is the solid core of this film."

"[4] Writing in The Village Voice in 2008, critic J. Hoberman wrote that "Weddings and Babies is "certainly the most extensive portrait of Manhattan's Little Italy before Martin Scorsese's incomparable Mean Streets."