Sunshine Cleaning

Two working-class sisters (Amy Adams, Emily Blunt) go into business cleaning up the mess at death scenes. In Megan Holley’s script, the sisters’ career path is evidently supposed to be a metaphor for their own messy and dead-end lives. Or something. The fact is, Holley and director Christine Jeffs don’t seem to have thought their story through, and they raise more questions about the potholes in their story than they answer. (Is cleaning up crime scenes really as simple as rubber gloves and a little elbow grease? And how do the sisters find these jobs, anyway?) The movie wears its indie-flick quirkiness like a badge of honor, as if assuming that the mere presence of Adams and Blunt (plus Alan Arkin as their eccentric father and Steve Zahn as Adams’ married lover) is enough to deserve our respect.