| 67 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Plays like a series of well-done but disconnected acting-class sketches, filled with a huge cast of first-rate actors whose careers have all gone into decline.
|
| 52 |
Mr. Showbiz
The movie is as schmaltzy as I'd feared, and yet De Salvo does elicit some nice performances from her ensemble cast.
|
| 50 |
New York Post
A soggy cannoli of a domestic dramedy.
|
| 50 |
Village Voice
Nico Baumbach
An earnest ensemble weeper I'd at least feel comfortable seeing with my grandmother.
|
| 50 |
Dallas Observer
Although DeSalvo performs the miracle of making these characters seem like people we actually know, occasionally her delivery definitely makes us wish we didn't.
|
| 50 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
Rather like listening to Vladimir Horowitz play "Chopsticks."
|
| 50 |
Miami Herald
Annie DeSalvo, a first-time director and screenwriter, can't escape the made-for-TV feel but does manage to give her cast, mostly once-big names fallen from grace and popularity, flashes of humanity between lessons about various saints and sermons disguised as dialogue.
|
| 40 |
TV Guide
Smacks of a certain kind of TV movie filled with pious uplift, even as it makes token concessions to contemporary lifestyles.
|
| 38 |
New York Daily News
Only a memorably commanding Ruehl transcends the limitations of her two-dimensional character.
|
| 38 |
Chicago Tribune
All the obligatory plot elements are there. Love and loss, anger and forgiveness, illness and death. But they never flow together to make a coherent story. Instead, they just pop up whenever the script is in trouble. Which is all the time.
|
| 30 |
Los Angeles Times
Has plenty of warmth, affection and conventional wisdom, but too much of the time it plays out in routine fashion with moments of contrivance.
|
| 25 |
San Francisco Chronicle
We all know how actors overact when they play Italians, and we all know how actors overact when they play brain-damaged characters, so just imagine Knight's performance as a brain-damaged Italian American.
|
| 25 |
Chicago Sun-Times
The movie should be praying to St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Maybe he could perform a miracle and turn this into a cable offering, so no one has to buy a ticket to see it.
|
| 20 |
LA Weekly
Chuck Wilson
The cast, which includes Cloris Leachman as the sisters' mother and Paul Sorvino, Jamey Sheridan and Mark Harmon as their various men, emote like pros, even as they deplete any audience goodwill left over from past triumphs.
|
| 20 |
Chicago Reader
The characters seem both reduced and idealized, and the plot has turns a dispassionate dramatist would avoid.
|
| 20 |
Variety
Most discomforting of all is the sight of world-class actors stuck in such threadbare material.
|
| 10 |
The New York Times
Although the concept seems promising enough, it is undone by disastrous casting decisions and an utter lack of ensemble unity.
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