Directed by John Sayles
Bernice and Fontayne grew up so tight they could ‘go for sisters’. After twenty years apart, they are reunited when Bernice is assigned to be Fontayne’s parole officer — just when she needs help on the wrong side of the law.
Пойти за сестёр, ללכת בשבילן, Приятелки до живот, As Irmãs
USA South by Southwest Film Festival USANR USA USA 
Really enjoyed and was moved by this film, which is (to date) the last movie John Sayles has made. Wish it had greater availability as the only way to see it currently seems to be via an OOP DVD. Here’s hoping Sayles has a few more like this in him. An interesting complement to LONE STAR in some ways.
Strip away every piece of plot, every side character, everything not related to the relationship between Fontayne and Bernice, and you would have a perfect film. (Okay, keep Olmos's line about starting a rock'n'roll band; that's pure cheeze in a great way.) The two have a chemistry to them that easily weaves the complicated morass that composes the distance between them--years, life paths, decisions, personalities.
The initial act of mercy between them is all that is needed to rekindle a spark of friendship, and from there, the labyrinth of baggage is adeptly navigated by the actresses and scriptwriter. There's a plot, but who cares. It gives us one or two moments (a bullet in a kneecap, a border guard appreciating…
The latest from John Sayles is of a piece with his previous work—a strongly humanitarian, character-focused work in no particular hurry, and more about exploring what people mean to each other than about action beats or big moments. It's also a crime procedural, in which a parole officer, one of her parolee clients, and a hired detective look for a missing man. The film's biggest flaw is that it's a little too linear, with every conversation leading to a new clue that leads to a new conversation that leads to a new clue, over and over like clockwork. Its advantages, though, are many: the performances are fantastic, and so are the characters and the cinematography. This is a low-key, even-handed film, but a very charming and effective one.
61/100
I've been saying for years that Sayles needs to take a break from stolid righteousness and do something vaguely disreputable, and he finally delivers. Not that he's changed his stripes, of course—this is still, to its credit, one of the few movies ever made about friendship between two black women, even if their relationship gradually gets subsumed by the idiot plot. By the end, events have turned overly preposterous relative to the characters' emotional verisimilitude, but at the same time aren't quite trashy enough to be enjoyable for their own sake; it's as if Passion Fish had merged with End of Watch. But the film is sharp and spiky right from the opening scene, in which Lisa Gay Hamilton's…
[Double feature review of Go for Sisters and Expats]
My favorite artistic experience is when I think I'm taking in one type of painting/film/music/play and realize over time that it is actually something else, another type. Like maybe a deft mash up of types that works only because the artist knows how to transcend genre.
Go For Sisters is a great example of a relevant, prescient social portrait that has a strong emotional resonance that then morphs into an Unstoppable Mom genre film.
By contrast Expats starts and ends with like 8 plus hours of that one note. The series producers assuming that simply by knowing there's a child in danger that you're on mom's side - doors gotta be…
Most thriller characters act like thriller characters with (if we're lucky) brief interruptions of recognizable human behavior. John Sayles would of course take the inverse approach, so despite the plot of Go For Sisters, which has a mother traveling into the underworld of illegal immigration in order to rescue her wayward son with the help of her best friend from high school and a nearly blind ex-cop, this never seems like anything other than a human story, about real people in a more-exciting-than-usual episode of their lives.
Sayles doesn't deserve all the credit for this, though, since his three leads turn in unfussy but very effective performances, so that even when the script gets a little distracted by Big Issues it never stays bogged down for long.
A low-key movie, definitely, but it hits the spot.
John Sayles films are rare things, they come around once in a great while but when they do they're big, bursting with great dialogue and always have something interesting to say or an original take on a familiar story. I even still got the vhs tape of City of Hope. I wont throw it away! Goddamn I love that movie! So much shit on dvd and City still in limbo. Here we have a detective story of sorts, a parole officer searches for her son with the help of a Mexican cop and a parolee. Sayles main interest is character development and manages to do it caring very much so for the story.
John Sayles had a rough time of late but this small almost thriller is probably his best work since Sunshine State (2002). The focus on character over issues helps on this as overall the film uses its ideas on border of law and lawless and its plotting (which borders on generic) just good meaty material for some underused actors (Lisa Gay Hamilton, Yolanda Ross, Edward James Olmos). There is a interesting tension between the plotting urgency which calls for the characters to go more and more deep into Mexican underworld while looking for Hamilton’s son and the film lazy hang out approach way more interested in Hamilton and Ross woking over their stranged friendship history. Go For Sisters uses well Sayles strengths (senses of place, handling of actors) and mostly sidesteps his weakness. This is a very self-conscious minor movie with quite a few lovely moments and more independent filmmakers should build films around Hamilton.
Watching all these John Sayles movies, I feel a kinship between Sayles and Jonathan Demme; big-hearted, humanistic filmmakers who tackle social issues with a character-first approach. This is Sayles' equivalent of Ricki and the Flash, a strong late-period work that's unfortunately also devoid of any visual interest. Sayles gets the rap of being an anti-stylist, but he generally works with strong enough cinematographers that the movies at least look good, while this one either looks bland as hell or cheap as hell (the iMovie fades to black and stock-footage establishing montages don't help). Luckily, Sayles is still a strong enough screenwriter that he can compensate, turning what could be a generic crime thriller into a study of the morally compromised…
Edward James Olmos is a rock star
Part of my 5 Directors x 5 Unseen Films (20) challenge.
This crime drama from writer-director-editor John Sayles starts out in Los Angeles, but it soon involves 65 separate shooting locations in the U.S. and Mexico. Lisa Gay Hamilton plays a by-the-book parole officer named Bernice Stokes, who temporarily has to handle the case of an old classmate and ex-junkie called Fontayne (Yolonda Ross). When Bernice uncharacteristically cuts her once best friend a little slack on a parole violation, Fontayne says she owes her one, little knowing what she'll soon have to do to repay that debt.
Bernice is a widow and the only soft spot in her otherwise hard life is her son Rodney (McKinley Belcher III). But he's…
Go for Sisters, while not among Sayles' greatest, was likeable and entertaining. The acting was fantastic, the dialogue was wonderful, and the characters were personable ... but the plot was disconnected and, at times, preposterous. Still, by me, any Sayles is better than no Sayles at all. Special mention to Edward James Olmos' embodiment of the old, nearly blind, retired lawman.
