Children of Men’s references feel at once calculated and perfunctory—bits of faux-political plumage affixed to what is, in essence, a post-apocalyptic cousin of Casablanca, with Owen in the Bogart role and Moore playing a combination of Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid.[…]
[For] the most part, the film’s ripped-from-recent-headlines touches seem like opportunistic attempts to add depth to what is, in its curiously hard heart, the most elaborate cinematographer’s reel in recent memory.
— Matt Zoller Seitz (Slant Magazine)
Infertility is but a metaphor that enables Children of Men to entertain the possibility of No Future. The only parents these days who assume their children will inhabit a better world are either those living in the gated communities of the super-rich or the immigrants imported to tend their gardens. That these 'fugees are visualized as the persecuted rabble of a crumbling empire is only one of this movie's inconvenient truths.
— J. Hoberman: Film After Film (Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?) (2012)
Synopsis: In 2027, in a chaotic world in which humans can no longer procreate, a former activist agrees to help transport a miraculously pregnant woman to a sanctuary at sea, where her child's birth may help scientists save the future of humankind.