SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Greenes Please don't spend money on this.

Keeley Coleman The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Hayleigh Joseph This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.

cowgoesmoo I guess I'll add my voice to the others here... As much as I loved the book, I was disappointed by the movie. The book had a balance between the family and the science. This movie emphasized Henrietta's daughter Deborah and how the source material for the book was gathered. There were some flashbacks to Henrietta's life and occasional references to the impact of HeLa cells on modern medicine, but not nearly enough in my opinion. While the book dove into the deep end, the movie just chooses to splash around in the shallow end and fails to focus on Henrietta, which is where the emphasis should really be. It left me feel like I was watching a Lifetime Television movie.Maybe its because they didn't think they had enough time... This was an HBO Film, so they could easily have done it as a 2 or 3 part series to stretch out and cover more of what the movie missed. As it stands, I would still love to see a documentary that picks up where the movie left off.

Michael Ledo In 1951 John Hopkins discovered that Henrietta Lacks had cells that can be stored and stay alive. This proved invaluable for medical research and has contributed to nearly every medical breakthrough since then. But who was she? The story is briefly about her life, but moreover it is about the hoops author Rebecca Skloot (Rose Byrne) had to jump through to get the story dealing with a dysfunctional family with misconceived ideas. Oprah Winfrey gave a strong performance as the paranoid hypochondriac daughter of Henrietta. Good drama with interesting characters.Guide: F-word. No sex or nudity.

msbehavin_brat I was so excited to see this movie, as the book has been on my list to read for awhile. I had not gotten around to reading the book prior to seeing the movie & perhaps that would have helped? The movie is disjointed & makes little sense. It is primarily about Henrietta's daughter & her relationship with the book's author. I was okay with that, but characters were never explained & many decisions in the film & dialogue made no sense b/c the story wasn't flushed out enough to understand the importance of the choices or dialogue. For example the "talk to the men" theme is made a big deal of in the beginning. It's repeated several times. It's never explained though. Why were they insistent that Skloot could only talk to the men. It came from several characters, but then most of the movie is spent NOT talking to the men. It never made any sense. Some character's behavior was not explained until almost the end of the film, which really hurt the viewer's ability to empathize & warm to the characters. It was such a shame as there were many great actors who performed well, but ultimately the lack of background info & poor choices, made this movie a mess. I had such high hopes :-( I'm still looking fwd to reading the book, maybe that will fill in the huge gaps of the movie. You won't miss much if you skip this one!

vincentlynch-moonoi I liked this film. I don't care about reading the book, as several reviewers recommended. Books are one form of media; film another form. I don't expect them to be the same.I thought the acting is this film was very good, in some cases excellent. Oprah Winfrey is excellent here, and although I have long been impressed with her as a media mogul, I haven't always been impressed with her acting. To me, she proves herself here. Rose Byrne as the White girl researching the story of Lacks is very effective. Courtney B. Vance -- a wonderful actor -- is wasted here. Same for Leslie Uggams, although I enjoyed seeing her. The rest of the actors, none of whom I was very familiar with (although I did recognize several), were also quite good.And yet I give this film only a "6". Why? Very simple (and I know I'm not the first to point this out). I didn't get to know much about Henrietta Lacks!!!!! The story is about Oprah Winfrey's character. The movie is still good, but the title character is almost secondary to the film. That doesn't make sense to me.So to me, to use a baseball analogy, the film get a hit to second base, but there's no home run. Worth watching, but disappointing.