Sister

This movie is fantastic!! I love the chemistry with the main characters. So moving & I cry EVERY SINGLE TIME that I watch it; easy 20x. Phenomenal dialogue and good supporting actors. Keep the tissue nearby because you're gonna need it.

If this movie were merely formulaic, it might be tolerable. But it is so much worse than that. With the exception of the Sister, every character is obnoxious and over-played. It's not even over yet, and I'm not sure I'll be able to see it through to the end to find out whether there's any redemption -- for the story, the characters or the actors.

Sister tackled a very sensitive issue (childhood attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), over-medication and misdiagnosis) skillfully and with grace. We saw the film at Waterfront Film Festival in South Haven, MI this past weekend, and sat in on an excellent Q&A with the director afterward.

We were extremely impressed with the actors in this film, and little Grace Kaufman who played Niki was wonderful! It was great to see Barbara Hershey, and she did a stellar job playing a mom with bipolar disorder. Reid Scott was also perfectly cast and was amazing! We loved this well-researched and beautifully done film. Thank you!!

I caught this movie on Showtime and decided to watch it. I was surprised and really enjoyed the movie. Everyone did a great job on the film. I saw the characters and not the actors/actresses who played them and the topics were something that many debate even today when it comes to putting children on drugs. Many feel that the children are being over medicated. Sometimes that's the case, sometimes it's not. still I liked that it took the time it needed to get to the points of the film and I really loved how it was done. If you haven't gotten a chance to see it. Please watch it. It touched on so many serious subjects and wasn't over dramatic about them. The wife was a piece of work though. Still the ending is really worth watching the movie.

'Sister' screened at the Traverse City Film Festival this summer. I've only walked out of two films in my life: 'The Passion of the Christ' and this one (Tommy Wiseau's 'The Room' is freakishly riveting by comparison). The topic - our culture's over-reliance on prescription drugs to medicate children - is long overdue for a serious film treatment. However, the script is so heavy handed (and, at times, tone deaf) that the actors have little room to become plausible characters. There's a rather familiar gallery of movie tropes here: the man-child with the stalled acting career and the loitering drinking buddies, the nagging but gorgeous striver-wife (whose prolonged swimming pool exit feels entirely pointless and gratuitous), the sullen teenage sister whose only apparent direction for the first half of the film was to pout and drop profanities (though I sense Grace Kaufman has some serious acting chops that will emerge with a better script). Overall, I'm still a bit baffled that the TCFF screening committee thought this was worthy of the Festival's tenth anniversary.