Advanced Search >
Help Me Search

Movies

Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores

Wide Releases
Now In Theaters

sort by namesort by score

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

Limited Releases
Now In Theaters

sort by namesort by score

58 (Untitled)
96 35 Shots of Rum
56 Adam
39 Adventures of Power
66 Afterschool
73 Amreeka
49 Antichrist
76 Baader Meinhof Complex, The
86 Beaches of Agnes, The
71 Big Fan
65 Black Dynamite
76 Bliss
26 Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, The
44 Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
81 Bright Star
76 Broken Embraces
70 Bronson
62 Cloud 9
65 Coco Before Chanel
69 Cold Souls
60 Collapse
82 Cove, The
75 Crude
82 Damned United, The
53 Dare
50 Defamation
67 Departures
70 Earth Days
85 Education, An
55 Endgame
88 Fantastic Mr. Fox
31 Fix
49 Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
80 Food, Inc.
xx From Mexico with Love
28 Gentlemen Broncos
72 Good Hair
89 Goodbye Solo
63 Horse Boy, The
74 House of the Devil, The
xx How to Seduce Difficult Women
26 I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
70 It Might Get Loud
46 Killing Kasztner
43 Little Traitor, The
34 Looking for Palladin
80 Lorna's Silence
46 Love Hurts
84 Maid, The
45 Mammoth
75 Messenger, The
55 Missing Person, The
59 More Than a Game
34 Motherhood
62 My One and Only
48 New York, I Love You
66 No Impact Man
26 Oh My God
68 Paranormal Activity
68 Paris
79 Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire
73 Red Cliff
69 September Issue, The
79 Serious Man, A
65 Skin
41 Splinterheads
42 Staten Island
50 Stoning of Soraya M., The
58 Storm
82 Sun, The
49 Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon
73 That Evening Sun
61 Trucker
49 Turning Green
83 U2 3D
45 Uncertainty
67 Visual Acoustics
32 War on Kids
67 Way We Get By, The
65 Wedding Song, The
xx White on Rice
59 William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
74 Woman in Berlin, A
43 Women in Trouble
69 Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

Sisters, The

EMAILPRINTArclight Films

Sisters, The reviews
40
5.5 User Score:

Mixed or average reviews

Based on 14 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

Based on 2 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >

Movie Info

Genre(s): Drama

Written by: Richard Alfieri (also play)
Anton Chekhov (inspiration, play The Three Sisters)

Directed by: Arthur Allan Seidelman

Release Date:
Theatrical: April 14, 2006
DVD: June 13, 2006

Running Time: 113 minutes, Color

Origin: USA

Summary

RATING: R for language and some sexual content

Starring Maria Bello, Mary Stuart Masterson, Erika Christensen, Eric McCormack, Chris O'Donnell, Tony Goldwyn, Steven Culp, Alessandro Nivola, Elizabeth Banks, and Rip Torn

Using a college on New York's Upper East Side as their surrogate home and sanctuary, four siblings struggle to banish the ghost of their dead father and create some semblance of harmony as adults. Suggested by Chekhov's "The Three Sisters," this unflinchingly honest drama explores and explodes the myths surrounding family and friendship. (Arclight Films)

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

75

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Intelligent, observant entertainment designed for an adult audience.

Read Full Review >
63

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Bello is phenomenally good as the embittered Marcia, while Stuart and Christensen do their best with their less complex roles, but they're all undermined by Alfieri's shrill, mannered dialogue and cliched backstories that wouldn't be out of place in a dysfunction-family-of-the-week movie.

Read Full Review >
50

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Family gatherings in the movies are shorthand for brutal trips down mine-strewn memory lanes. The Sisters doesn't disappoint in that regard.

Read Full Review >
50

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

The Sisters is still somewhat compelling thanks to Bello, whose unguarded, provocative work continually resuscitates this corpse of a melodrama whenever it lays fallow.

Read Full Review >
50

LA Weekly Chuck Wilson

The Sisters may be worth a look, however, for the work of the magnificent Bello and Tony Goldwyn, who's never been better than as the married man with whom Marcia has an affair. Their final clench is pure, guilty-pleasure melodrama, which means it's not the least bit Chekhovian.

Read Full Review >
50

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Projects like this bring out the best in actors, who take salary cuts to work in Chekhov (even at one remove). What we can guess, watching the film, is that the same players would make a good job of "Three Sisters" but are undermined by the faculty club, which works like a hotel lobby. There's no way to sustain dramatic momentum here.

Read Full Review >
40

Variety Ronnie Scheib

Even a magnificently inspired Maria Bello proves insufficiently daring to save Richard Alfieri and Arthur Allan Seidelman's Chekhov-based chamber piece Sisters from pretentious psychodrama.

Read Full Review >
40

The New York Times Neil Genzlinger

Insufferable characters make for an insufferable play or movie. The Sisters, a grueling family feud conceived by Richard Alfieri, proves the point.

Read Full Review >
40

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

A pompous, overwrought and itchingly claustrophobic psychodrama.

Read Full Review >
38

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Pretentious, stagy and over-the-top update of Chekov's "The Three Sisters."

Read Full Review >
30

Village Voice Mark Holcomb

A clumsy graft of Chekhovian high dudgeon and harsh, Albee-esque psychological realism that probably worked better onstage.

Read Full Review >
30

The Hollywood Reporter John DeFore

Lifeless and irredeemably sour. It is difficult to imagine much of an audience embracing it, despite a cast of well-knowns and up-and-comers.

Read Full Review >
25

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

The Sisters isn't just bad Chekhov; it's bad Chekhov modernized and then plunked in front of a camera.

Read Full Review >
20

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

The result is an insufferable academic cocktail party of declamatory speeches coaxed to life in its middle stretch by the incredible Maria Bello, who wades in like a paramedic at a disaster scene.

Read Full Review >

What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this movie is 5.5 (out of 10) based on 2 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Deborah T. gave it a10:
Chekhov made comprehensible but more than that, a great piece of work by itself. Plus, great performances, esp. from Maria Bello and Tony Goldwyn but generally from everyone.

Popular on CBS sites: SEC Football | NFL | Video Game Cheats | iPhone | Video Game Reviews | Notebooks | Antivirus Software

About CBS Interactive | Jobs | Advertise

© 2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy (UPDATED) | Terms of Use