SISTER ACT

SISTER ACT is feel-good cinema at its finest. Funny, warm and completely unpretentious, it takes a brilliantly simple premise and gets almost everything right.

Whoopi Goldberg is hilarious as the proverbial fish out of water, playing Deloris Van Cartier, a Reno lounge singer who witnesses a murder and is placed into hiding in the one place she’s least likely to blend in: a convent.

But what makes SISTER ACT work so well is what happens once the joke has been established. Deloris arrives as an outsider and slowly becomes part of this strange little community. She brings confidence and life to the convent choir, but the relationship works both ways. The sisters give her somewhere to belong at a moment when she has nowhere else to go.

That makes it a perfect fit for our season about the families we’re born into and the families we build. SISTER ACT understands that some of the strongest relationships in our lives can begin with people we have absolutely nothing in common with.

Maggie Smith is the perfect foil for Goldberg as the increasingly exasperated Mother Superior, while Kathy Najimy and Wendy Makkena are wonderful as Sisters Mary Patrick and Mary Robert. The whole ensemble is terrific, particularly once that famously terrible choir begins to discover what it can actually do.

And the music still holds up. Those Motown-inspired arrangements are a huge part of why the film is so much fun, and the soundtrack is seriously underappreciated. I’ll be playing it on the rooftop before the film begins, so you’ll have plenty of time to get in the mood.

This September we want the rooftop to be somewhere you can watch films that leave you feeling better than when you arrived. SISTER ACT does exactly that. It’s funny, generous, full of great songs and still one of the most enjoyable crowd movies of the 1990s.