"A Rain of Tears Under a Piece of Blue Sky"

Directed by Nick Cassavetes (The Notebook), this adaptation of Jodi Picoult's dense and melodramatic 2004 novel about a family struggling to save a terminally ill child comes to tear-duct-exhausted life on the big screen. Brian and Sara Fitzgerald (Jason Patric and Cameron Diaz) customized their second daughter, Anna (Abigail Breslin), in utero to be a perfect biological match for her sister Kate (Sofia Vassilieva), who was diagnosed with leukemia at an early age.

With each of Kate's relapses, Anna's parents drag her to the hospital to harvest her blood, lymphocytes, granulocytes, and bone marrow. With the final relapse, she's asked to cough up a kidney. So she takes her life savings and hires a lawyer (Alec Baldwin) asking to be medically emancipated from her parents.

The Fitzgerald family and movie itself wrestle with unanswerable moral questions from can parents force their child to become an organ donor for a fatally ill sibling? to what is the meaning behind such tragedy and pain? And the audience is left wondering not only how the family will heal from the ravages of the disease, but also from the splits caused by the courtroom battle.

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