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Sunshine Cleaning (2008)

Director: Christine Jeffs

Time Out rating

Average user rating

4 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

Try if you can to avoid the inevitable salvo of assurances that ‘Sunshine Cleaning’ is this year’s ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, or this year’s ‘Juno’. Sure, it has the usual Sundance/US indie baggage – sibling rivalry, unfeasibly precocious/adorable child actor, Alan Arkin essaying the loveably eccentric side to senility… again – but this is actually superior to both those films.

Amy Adams and Emily Blunt make for a convincing pairing as Rose and Norah Lorkowski, blue-collar siblings who hatch a scheme to make big money clearing up the blood and guts at crime scenes. There are plenty of ‘ewww!’ gags in the early stages, but things start to refocus when the messiness of their grimy new profession rolls over into a storyline full of decoys, loose ends and characters who, rather poignantly, just drift away. Jeffs makes a good fist of the direction and Blunt proves that she can do comedy, but it’s Adams’s comforting, charismatic central turn which really gives the film its lift.

Author: David Jenkins 2009-06-23 12:01:00

Time Out London Issue 2027, June 25 – July 1, 2009

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User reviews of this film

rose hawkes said...

Posted on Oct 17 2009 08:49 Great film, we loved it ! So much better than 500 letters which we saw last night and went nowhere. I loved Emily Blunt's character, and I'm glad the cat is safe !

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Paul said...

Posted on Jul 06 2009 07:59 Not a bad story to spend the night seeing and it saved me from watching the Wimbledon final. A timepasser of a film if you have nothing else to do. It reminded me of a time before CGI and SFX when a film could be a handful of actors and a script.

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Phil Ince said...

Posted on Jul 03 2009 13:04 PS: But Emily Blunt's crush on the daughter of a deceased client is a beautiful study in yearning and hesitancy.

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Phil Ince said...

Posted on Jun 30 2009 10:27 This is soap. If you like soap, you might well like this. I thought it was a bit thin. Good performances but the story is periodically dependent on people behaving stupidly. Good enough but a bit irritating because none of the main characters are easy to like or respect.

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