My Sister’s Keeper
Cameron Diaz and Abigail Breslin play a mother and a daughter who balks at providing organs to her leukemia-stricken sister.
Directed by Nick Cassavetes
(PG-13)
*
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
An 11-year-old sues for medical emancipation from her parents.
My Sister’s Keeper “might as well be sponsored by Kleenex,” said Lou Lumenick in the New York Post. To follow his ridiculously weepy The Notebook, director Nick Cassavetes opted for another tear-jerker with an anguish-inducing premise. In this adaptation of Jodi Picoult’s novel, Cameron Diaz and Abigail Breslin play a mother and a daughter who is conceived and genetically engineered to provide blood, organs, and bone marrow for her leukemia-stricken teenage sister (Sofia Vassilieva). When Breslin’s character is expected to give up her kidney, she hires a lawyer to medically emancipate herself from her parents. Part family melodrama and part legal thriller, the film “takes a compelling ethical dilemma and turns it into formulaic pap,” said Claudia Puig in USA Today. The book paused to dwell on complex moral questions, but the film “doesn’t scratch beyond the surface.” My Sister’s Keeper is nothing but a “Lifetime-style movie” gussied up with an emo-music soundtrack and bathetic montages. “There’s a fine line between moving and manipulation,” said Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. Cassavetes misses it by a mile.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
Home Depots are the new epicenters of ICE raids
In the Spotlight The chain has not provided many comments on the ongoing raids
-
Why does Trump keep interfering in the NYC mayoral race?
Today's Big Question The president has seemingly taken an outsized interest in his hometown elections, but are his efforts to block Zohran Mamdani about political expediency or something deeper?
-
The pros and cons of banning cellphones in classrooms
Pros and cons The devices could be major distractions