• Starring: Jeffrey Johnson, Robyn Lively, Tanner Maguire
  • Summary: Tyler Doherty is an extraordinary eight-year-old boy. Surrounded by a loving family and community, and armed with the courage of his faith, he faces his daily battle against cancer with bravery and grace. To Tyler, God is a friend, a teacher and the ultimate pen pal—Tyler's prayers take the form of letters, which he composes and mails on a daily basis. The letters find their way into the hands of Brady McDaniels, a beleaguered postman standing at a crossroads in his life. At first, he is confused and conflicted over what to do with the letters. But the decision he ultimately makes becomes a testament to the quiet power of one boy's shining spirit and unshakeable faith. (Vivendi Entertainment) Expand
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 0 out of 7
  2. Negative: 3 out of 7
  1. A bland, pious yet touching faith-based tearjerker.
  2. Reviewed by: Eric Hynes
    50
    With little in the way of story or spectacle to offer nonbelievers, the film itself just preaches to the choir.
  3. 38
    Good looking (it was filmed in Winter Garden) but slow and bland, this faith-based tear-jerker is a depressingly unemotional affair, with writing and some of the acting so flat that even its emotionally loaded situations can't inspire waterworks.

See all 7 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 8 out of 11
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 11
  3. Negative: 3 out of 11
  1. DougV
    10
    This movie had great acting and the ability to show both the good and bad involved in the events. On the one hand you had those that faith in the healing. On the other hand you had those that were trying to focus on physical only. That is a common struggle in real life and they brought it out well here too. Expand
    • 2 of 3 users said yes
  2. Incredible movie it completely Changed my life!!!People who are not soft or don't have a close personal relationship with God will not enjoy this but if they do it will change their lives forever!!!:-) Expand
    • 0 of 1 users said yes
  3. ChadS
    3
    To me, there's more spirituality coursing through the celluloid of Robert Bresson's "Au hasard Balthazar" than this Christian recruitment tool for people who love God, not movies. To me, there's more signs of God in the titular donkey than the church where Brady(Jeffrey Johnson), an alcoholic mailman, finds redemption after a DUI arrest with his son present in the stopped vehicle. But to its credit, "Letters to God" does include a scene in which infidels can relate to, because finally, somebody makes sense. Maddie(Robin Lively), the mother of a young boy stricken with brain cancer, tells her own mom, "Stop quoting the Bible to me. It's not curing my son." She disagrees with God's will, so for a little while, in a loaded film which preaches to the converted, "Letters to God" becomes accesible to those who believe that having faith is "religilous". In her darkest hour, when Maddie can no longer pretend that supplication has the power to repel the cancer cells from ravaging her son Tyler(Tanner Maguire), Olivia(Maree Cheatham), instead of talking like a grown-up, offers her daughter platitudes, a stock choice of words that confronts the matter at hand with magic. (Like Sarah Silverman says, "Jesus is magic!") This mother's flare-up creates a slight rupture in the Christian-based rhetoric of the filmic text, which, incidentally, is the film's only sane moment because "Letters to God" sees tragedy with rose-tinted glasses. Because Tyler drinks the ideological kool-aid, he sees a newly-born baby as being his replacement. In the bedroom, Maddie tells her son otherwise, that he can't be supplanted, but this is exactly what the movie intimates, and believes. Earlier in the film, his best friend's grandfather tells the sick boy about how he was "handpicked by God" and "chosen for the role of a lifetime". "Dying is Fine", in a sense, because God's will and plan can't be cross-examined under the strictest sense of church dogma. But Tyler couldn't be faulted if he changed his mind about death, echoing the John Ryan Pike(of Ra Ra Riot) line: "You know that dying is fine, but maybe I wouldn't like death if death were good." Expand
    • 4 of 4 users said yes

See all 11 User Reviews

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