My Sister's Keeper

Nick Cassavetes is best known for ‘The Notebook’, so naked bathos-mongering is what people will come to ‘My Sister’s Keeper’ for, and it mostly delivers. After Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) was diagnosed with leukemia as a child, her parents in vitro engineered Anna (Abigail Breslin) to be her match for surplus bone marrow, kidneys and the rest. Now the younger kid wants out and is willing to sue. The family splits, with Anna and dad (Jason Patric) on one side and devoted mum, Sara (Cameron Diaz), on the other decrying Anna’s ‘selfishness’.

Novelist Jodi Picoult has fashioned herself as a conversation-starter about genetics and medical ethics, but her lurid scenario is nonsense. Cassavetes has unexpectedly toned down the over-the-top series of twists from the novel’s last third, though restraint is still a relative concept. The tearjerking is mostly along the sister-sister and mother-daughter axes, aside from a brief romance Kate has with a fellow patient. Diaz is a whiny irrelevance, but sharp supporting work from Alec Baldwin and Joan Cusack makes the proceedings tolerable for boyfriends