Waste of time

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

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.

It is Christmas Eve, 2016 and I had no idea why I recorded this... yet now I understand. I lived in a world of bi-polarity and I needed this film today. The systematic approach to the unraveling of one character poised next to the grounding and evolving of the two leads was illuminating. Reid Scott and Grace Kaufman were incredible together. The evolving of love, trust, and loyalty was compelling. People who have survived families with members who were mentally ill will appreciate the links that were absent in their own lives-the bond of love and the impact it has on emotional development. This movie takes on a very misunderstood issue of mental illness and misuse of psychotropic drugs. Everyone has a unique electrical system. The Psychiatrist espoused an ignorant manifesto, but he too evolved. I loved the movie because the conflict was realistic, approach individualized (never intended to be a panacea) and the characters were viable!

'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.

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!!