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Sara (Cameron Diaz) experiences a moment of truth with her daughter Anna (Abigail Breslin) in “My Sister’s Keeper.” |
Moviegoers who enjoy a good cathartic release watching films about children afflicted with cancer will get their money’s worth in Nick Cassavetes’ glorified Lifetime Channel feature “My Sister’s Keeper.”
Young Sofia Vassilieva plays Kate, a bald cancer victim, with appropriately quivering lips, a wavering voice and huge dark pools of sympathetic pupils in her increasingly sunken eyes.
Caleb Deschanel’s empathetic cameras capture Kate in near-celestial settings while the soundtrack lines up an MP-3 supply of sensitive, tone-setting songs, all topped with Aaron Zigman’s appropriately downer score.
On the weepie rating scale, I’d award “My Sister’s Keeper” three and a half boxes of Kleenex. It would have earned five boxes, except that Cassavetes, who directed and cowrote the screenplay with Jeremy Leven, blunts the weep factor by hamstringing his cast and allowing a compelling courtroom story to get lost in a barrage of strained, happy-family montages and unpleasant bouts of vomiting, crying, shouting and bleeding. (Read more…)