A Little Bit of Heaven – review

This romcom-weepie fails the Trade Descriptions Act on two counts: it is a very large bit of pure bloody hell. Kate Hudson stars as a sassy, liberated career woman with loads of friends and a throbbing no-strings sex life. One day, she gets a picturesque form of cancer, whose symptoms include becoming really sleepy and pale and not wearing eye makeup; she and her dreamboat doctor, played by Gael García Bernal, fall tenderly in love. But not before she's had dreamlike visions of going to heaven and meeting God's emissary, played by beamingly wise Whoopi Goldberg. This film is one long biopsy of pure horror: the tumours of sentimentality and bad acting metastasise everywhere, and Bernal, in particular, is horrendously bad. How is it that this actor, so great in Amores Perros and Y Tu Mamá También, has become a virtual kite-mark of ordure? Mammoth, Letters to Juliet and now this.