The Last Thakur (15)

Reviewed,Anthony Quinn
Friday 26 June 2009 00:00 BST
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This medical-ethics drama is like a sustained assault on the tear ducts. ,/p>

Abigail Breslin plays Anna, an 11-year-old girl who's kept her leukaemic sister (Sofia Vassilieva) alive through lymphocytes and bone-marrow transplants. Her parents want Anna to donate her kidney, and she's not going to let them – indeed, she hires a lawyer (Alec Baldwin) to win her "medical emancipation". Based on a Jodi Picoult bestseller, this is all of a tremble with big issues and major confrontations, most of them centred on Cameron Diaz's control-freak mom, and I found myself not believing a minute of it.

A stranger with a rifle arrives in the town of Doulathpur, where a political feud rages between the Muslim Chairman (Ahmed Rubel) and the Hindu landlord Thakur (Tariq Anam Khan); what is the stranger's grievance, and which of the rivals is his target? Sadik Ahmed's film, long on smouldering looks and short on narrative bite, makes it difficult to know, and harder to care.

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