THOUGH not quite Y Tu Mamá También, this lively reunion for Mexican superstars Gael Garcia Bernal, Diego Luna and filmmaking brothers Carlos and Alfonso Cuarón gets plenty of mileage out of the easy camaraderie that made their previous collaboration
such a joy to watch. Lacking his elder brother's astonishing visual flair, Carlos Cuarón still makes a solid directorial debut (he co-scripted Y Tu Mamá También) with a ribald comedy about rival half-brothers whose dreams of becoming professional footballers intensify their fraternal friction. Narration is by the irascible, on-the-make talent scout (Guillermo Francella) who spots them playing while on a break from their deadbeat jobs on a banana plantation.
His insistence that he can take only one of them on at a time leads to much bitterness as flamboyant Cursi (Bernal) makes his mark first and uses his newfound fame to launch a pop career, while married gambling addict Rudo (Luna) has to watch from the sidelines. Eventually Rudo gets a shot at glory too, and, as they find themselves in opposing teams with fluctuating fortunes, Cuarón ratchets up the football-as-a-metaphor-for-life parallels to undercut the screwball comedy with some incisive points about the way rampant corruption in Mexico keeps people down.
Alistair HarknessMY SISTER'S KEEPER (12A)
**
DIRECTED BY: NICK CASSAVETES
STARRING: CAMERON DIAZ, ABIGAIL BRESLIN, ALEC BALDWIN, JASON PATRICIt's some while since anybody tried a terminal-illness weepie, and this one at least has pedigree of a sort, adapted from the Jodi Picoult bestseller by the writer-director team behind the oddly revered Alzheimer's romance The Notebook. Various family members narrate their experiences of one child's leukaemia: there's parents Diaz and Patric, concerned but helpless; terminally ill daughter Kate (Sofia Vassilieva); and her "donor child" sister, Anna (Breslin), conceived specifically to provide Kate with spare body parts, who elects to sue her parents for emancipation to allow her sibling to die.
It was wise to cast the unimpeachable Breslin in a role of someone whose actions could be taken as an expression of morbid self-interest, but the remainder is rather too reliant for its effects on shots of Vassilieva vomiting blood, and suffers from a couple of misjudged performances:
Diaz hardly exudes maternal warmth, and there's a bizarre turn from Alec Baldwin as a hotshot lawyer who enters the courtroom alongside a service dog. Unfailingly sincere, and not the worst option if you were in desperate need of a sob, this mostly offers all the fun and frolics to be expected from watching a young girl going slowly into renal failure.
Mike McCahill