It's unusual to find the cinema tackling a subject - terminal illness - that TV movies have made their own, and still less common to find two major stars (Julia Roberts and Susan Sarandon) in the first double-girl bawler since Beaches and Terms of Endearment. The girls are good and the film inevitably has many touching moments, but there are script problems here that drain your sympathy just when it should be at its height: people behave unreasonably throughout for the sake of dramatic confrontation. This contrivance forces Jena Malone, as the 12-year-old who hates stepmom-to-be Roberts, time and again to say things that ring comprehensively false, as she longs for the departed love of cancer-stricken mother Sarandon. Some beautiful photographic compositions complete a mixed bag for those prepared to stay the course.