My Sister's Keeper: Critic Reviews

Their message in My Sister's Keeper? Cancer sucks, but there's always the balm of beach scenes and an emo soundtrack.

My Sister's Keeper takes on a very tough subject, but ultimately it is too soft, too easy, and it dissolves like a tear-soaked tissue.

My Sister's Keeper takes a compelling ethical dilemma and turns it into formulaic pap by trying relentlessly to ensure an emotional reaction with sentimental exploitation and plot contrivances.

An adaptation that, although departing dramatically from such key elements as the book's ending, will please fans.

This book hasn't been adapted, it's been taken outside and shot.

Makeup department realism alone can't redeem the dramatic fallacies surrounding it.

A shameless attempt at manipulation that wants but doesn't earn audience tears.

For all its awkward structure, the film is heartfelt and deeply affecting.

My Sister's Keeper has a gutsy premise, but no guts.

My Sister's Keeper humanizes vexing questions about medical ethics without sacrificing rattling family drama.

My Sister's Keeper is an immediate audience-grabber.

You may cry at the film's designated crying times, approximately every 10 minutes, like the traffic and weather. Or you may not, and wonder instead why some high-gloss weepies treat their source material quite so shamelessly.

Surrounding and ultimately subsuming this ethical struggle is a fair amount of pediatric-cancer horror and mush, though Cassavetes is frequently bailed out by his cast.

My Sister's Keeper offers a couple of twists, one of them crucial and the other cruelly unnecessary and melodramatic.

Uneven but deeply moving.

A surprisingly lovely movie about an absolutely awful subject, My Sister's Keeper features what also may be the year's first performance worthy of Oscar mention.

A lot of things don't work that well in My Sister's Keeper, a tearjerker adapted from Jodi Picoult's best-seller. But one thing is guaranteed: The movie practically forces you to shed a tear or two.

The writing team of Jeremy Leven and director Cassavetes have joined forces with a great cast to bring the best-selling book by Jodi Picoult to life with a purity that can only be called inspirational.

Unsubtle, uneven and undeniably effective.

My Sister's Keeper targets tear ducts so ruthlessly, it might as well be sponsored by Kleenex.

Films that present a moral dilemma and make us consider the unthinkable are as rare as bargain popcorn in the summer. Cassavetes manages that feat and turns this weeper into a keeper.

With solid performances and an intelligent script, My Sister's Keeper offers a moving and powerfully realistic portrait of a family stalked by tragedy that somehow manages to emerge from crisis battered but intact.

Less an exercise in catharsis than an obstacle course of premise-heavy, flashback-drenched plot points, it's an emotional flat-liner, even though virtually every character (including Alec Baldwin as the lawyer) carries some hurt or grief.

If you're going to make a weepy, there's no reason you can't make it with intelligence and insight as the makers of My Sister's Keeper have done.