It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Well done about a subject that needs to addressed more. But if they were all on Dr. Phil I imagine the good doctor would point out to Halles's character that she seemed to want her son back as much if not more so, for herself and her own healing.

"Losing Isaiah" is one of those movies which should have been a masterpiece. It had a star-studded cast of very talented actors and actresses and a controversial premise that could have proved intriguing and thought provoking. It's such a shame then that this movie is undermined by weak plot development, poor character development and a sloppy script To be fair, this movie isn't terrible but I think that's mostly due to the excellent casting in this movie rather than anything else. Jessica Lange gives great depth and dimension to her role and allows the viewer to feel great sympathy, understanding and compassion for her character and its predicament. Samuel L Jackson also gives quite a lot of depth to his role Mark John Jeffries is amazing in his portrayal of Isaiah -great talent for one so young -and Daisy Eagan's performance as Jessica Lange's daughter is also wonderful. This is not Halle Berry's best performance but in all fairness, I don't think this is totally her fault for reasons I'll mention below The character development is woeful. Both Halle Berry and Samuel L Jackson in particular are essentially reduced to stock characters with the latter in particular reduced to spouting out tired old clichés about race and racial stereotypes that are tedious and almost painful to watch. In the hands of more talented production/script team, these issues could probably have been discussed and explored much more effectively but here they just sound weak and annoying. Halle Berry's character is equally as badly sketched and the writers fail to give it the depth and the substance (or the dialogue or emotion) that would allow the audience to feel greater sympathy or empathy for her and her predicament.Finally there's the plot development. Although the writers/producers do a good job exploring the circumstances behind the adoption of Isaiah by the Lewin family and illustrating how he has become an integral part of the family, they drop the ball as soon as they introduce the sequence of events where Halle Berry's character wants custody back of her baby. In particular the courtroom drama relating to Halle Berry's desire to have her son back was ultimately weak and deeply flawed -failing to explore the issues properly beyond a bunch of tired of clichés -and this meant that the court's ultimate judgment was unsatisfying and difficult to comprehend by the audience. To be fair, the ending to the movie wasn't totally awful but probably was a too cute effort to try and wrap everything up and tie up the loose ends and forge some attempt at consensus -probably unrealistic in real life."Losing Isaiah" is still a watchable movie despite all these flaws but it's just incredibly frustrating to see all the potential of a great cast and a great plot potential squandered. If you read Jessica Lange's comments about this movie in the trivia section, it probably sums up accurately this movie and all that is wrong with it

2 women 1 child, but all the love in the world. Halle Berry was outstanding and Jessica Lang was as well. This movie was a great touching movie and showed us all that the love of a child goes deeper than anyone can imagine. A drug addict who leaves her baby in a box so she can go get high. A Dr. who gets attached to this drug addicted baby, who later adopts him. Its about a family who loves this little boy more than anything and in one swift moment the mother comes back, clean and sober and wants her baby back. Does she deserve him, whose to say, just because she made a mistake and almost killed him doesn't mean she loves him any less right??? A story about a woman who sees that she cant come in and take a child and make everything alright, a woman who feels dead and wants to die than to lose the child she has come to love as her own. Two women who come together to give this child all the love that they can. Its a touching movie, and and inspiration to see one woman turn her life around. Its a story not about race, but about LOVE and how one and even two can love someone so much. I really enjoyed it.

Seth Margolis' novel becomes middle-of-the-road drama about a white woman and her husband fighting a black woman in court over the custody of the black woman's baby son, whom she left in a dumpster two years prior to cleaning up her life as a homeless crack-addict. Uninventive presentation plays like a dulled-out TV-movie, and the two leading actresses (Jessica Lange and Halle Berry), while well cast, can't do much more than fill these stock roles with their individual charisma and personalities (they can't invest much heart into the proceedings when the screenplay is all processed emotion). The outcome of the case (and the reasons for the outcome) seem dated already, and the concluding events are standard, predictable scenes of coming to terms. ** from ****