The Amati Girls (2001)

THE AMATI GIRLS is a tale of four Catholic sisters that stick together through thick and thin. When their aging mother, Dolly (Cloris Leachman), loses her husband of 47 years, her four adult daughters come to her side to comfort her and help her through the transition. Each daughter is in a different stage of her love life, creating a number of alternately tearful and comedic situations. Under the circumstances--four loyal Italian daughters mourning the death of their father--the women play the melodrama to the hilt. United with their mother as a loving family, they find that need each other more than they imagined.

With a mood that is at once heartwarming, tragic and comic, Anne DeSalvo's film recalls the early classic Hollywood "women's pictures" and melodramas from a simpler era. The cast is studded with Academy Award winners like Mercedes Ruehl, who gives an authentic performance as Grace, a devout Catholic and faithful wife to husband Joe (Paul Sorvino). Cloris Leachman plays the family matriarch with a humorous gusto. And Lee Grant is wonderful as the colorful Aunt Splendora.