REVIEW: A Little Bit of Heaven, a Whole Lotta Torture

The old-fashioned cancer weeper — a genre that includes pictures like Love Story, Brian’s Song, and the gold standard of chemocathartic melodrama, Terms of Endearment — has been in short supply these days, maybe because nakedly manipulative tearjerking is a hard sell with modern audiences. Jonathan Levine tried to freshen the genre with last year’s 50/50 and pulled it off with reasonably effective results, thanks largely to the unassuming charisma of his star, Joseph Gordon-Levitt: You don’t want to see anyone get cancer, but you particularly don’t want to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt get cancer. You may not want to see Kate Hudson get cancer, either, as her character does in A Little Bit of Heaven. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to like her. The tiniest bit of Hudson’s wrinkly-crinkly cuteness goes a long way, and in A Little Bit of Heaven, watching her waste away becomes slow torture. She’s like an adorbs Camille.
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