Sisters (2015)

Sisters is a 2015 comedy about two estranged adult siblings, Kate and Maura, who return to their childhood home in Orlando to clear out a bedroom before the sale closes, and who instead throw one final party in the emptied house. The plot is a delivery mechanism for slapstick and vulgarity, and it works about as often as it does not. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have been doing this together long enough that their rhythm needs no introduction.

Screening this one for progressive content yields a modest return. The film is female-led and female-written, Paula Pell handling the script, and it slots neatly into the 2011 to 2015 cycle of ensemble comedies for women that critics kept comparing to Bridesmaids. That is a kind of cultural awareness, though it lives almost entirely in the casting and never announces itself. The supporting bench is reasonably varied, with Maya Rudolph, Renée Elise Goldsberry, John Leguizamo, and Greta Lee, the last of whom plays a nail stylist and leans on a stereotype the screenplay does not examine.

The rest of the ledger is bare. No queer characters, no engagement with race beyond the presence of performers, no climate anxiety, no critique of the property market it spends two hours negotiating, no body politics, no neurological diversity, no historical claims to revise. The single geological event, a backyard pool collapsing into a sinkhole, exists to drop a teenager into a hole. And the film resists the sermon. It wants to be rude and it stays rude, saving its hugs for the last five minutes. We can respect the restraint.