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Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

If Rosie O'Donnell weren't mired in controversy all the time, she would better be known for being a decent actress. Although she gives an over-the-top performance here, she is credible as a retarded woman forced to come to terms with her life when her father dies suddenly.Andie McDowell plays her beautiful career-oriented photography sister. There is a married brother but he fades from view too quickly.Flashbacks are used effectively here detailing their early lives, where the parents went their separate ways and eventually, the mother left for greener pastures in California.There is a Jewish funeral for the father here but yet the two sisters exchange Christmas presents. Let's get that straight even if they came from a mixed marriage.The film shows how some people can be so cruel to a retarded person. Beth, the O'Donnell character, spends her days riding on the buses and eating constantly. As a result, she appears slovenly as well as talking quite loud. There is a definite constant shrill in O'Donnell's voice and after a while, it becomes annoying.As a result of the father's death, Rachel,(McDowell) must come to grips with her own life as well. Even in the face of cruelty, we see the bus drivers as totally sympathetic characters to Beth.

Riding the Bus with My Sister is a shameless attempt to put up such an insane sequence of events into a two-hour-plus-commercials time slot to total up to this: Beth (Rosie O'Donnell) is inspiring and courageous and livens up those lives of people around her, and anyone who doesn't see otherwise can shove it. But the opposite is true, particularly due to the performance, though the writing doesn't help. It's not within the power of a filmmaker to make something that doesn't draws the viewer compassionately in, as LONG AS it doesn't try and think the viewers themselves are, to use the word bluntly, retarded. But Angelica Huston, who doesn't seem to do her late-father proud when it comes to taking the director's chair, plops on the sentiment when really what is being revealed is the wildly contrived story of a control freak who's mean and annoying and, at the end of it all, unsympathetic. This might be passing a lot of judgment on O'Donnell's character, who was based on a real person, but it's not without some notice. Beth might be one of the most irritating characters in recent memory, in TV or elsewhere.This doesn't mean some (totally unintentional) laughs aren't to be had at the expense of the totally dingbat turn from O'Donnell. Maybe it's method, maybe it's just playing it in a very horrific one-note way, but she doesn't do anything to help make this big goose who doesn't seem to notice that the ones who point out that she's loud and obnoxious might be the correct ones. No, the point of view of the filmmakers control that more than anything, wherein it's all either black or white: either people really respect and care for her (the black tae-kwan-do student who has the Isaac Hayes look is never explained really as to why he's with her aside from 'she makes me laugh, I love her, blah blah'), or they're dismayed by her rude quality, like when she's at the cafeteria the bus drivers are at and, after the umpteenth time she's been there, is yelled at by one of the other drivers to get out as it's the BUS DRIVERS section. It would be one thing if the writer tried to make this as some legitimate dramatic scene, but it's all played up like "people just don't understand," which is accentuated by the whole relationship between the two sisters.Now, it's not that McDowell doesn't try a little with the part, but what is there to be given to her anyway? Her part is meant as a lazy counterpoint to Beth's half-crazy half-stupid mindset. She's a career woman who is a photographer (not very well apparently, even when she makes "arty" photos in black and white), who puts aside her career, and her boyfriend, to stay with Beth after the death of their father. Rainman, however, this surely is not; the story has very little in the way of actual development, except for the most base and totally, despicably predictable points, with O'Donnell grinding on through in a performance that gives cringe-worthy a bad name (or a good name, I guess). Even the flashbacks are ridiculously inept at showing anything aside from 'I didn't really care for my sister then, and I should've, as it took my father about my entire adolescence to move out of the house', in a gray Flags of Our Fathers tint of course. This is all capped off with a final section where Beth tries to contemplate having children. At this point, against my better judgment, I soldiered on to the end, with rests on a shot of Beth, her sister, and the "hot" bus driver all in a goofy pose. If you have the guts to go through it, just make sure to know there's many "laughs, tears, hugs, etc", complete with the sappiest guitar pluckings this side of Eric Clapton after watching a puppy die, and an atmosphere of total dread where there should be some rays of happiness for these people for the audience. No such luck; it's a Hallmark movie at its most exploitative.

I think the current rating of "3.7" for this movie is way too high.Probably the worst movie I have ever seen, and thats really saying something.Do yourself a favor and give this movie a miss, unless of course you are a masochist and even then I doubt you will last the course.Listening to Rosie O'Donnell screeching for a few hours with absolutely no acting talent and probably an embarrassment to all around here... now surely everyone else had something better to do?Andie MacDowell really needs to forget this film... fastAbsolutely dreadful.

I have worked with developmentally challenged children and young adults, and found Rosie O'Donnell's performance excellent. While Dustin Hoffman and Geoffrey Rush portrayed characters who were obviously handicapped, Rosie portrayed a character as we often perceive the mentally handicapped - looking "normal", and at first seeming "normal", then realizing that there is something different.Previous posts complained that they were looking for laughs, but the synopsis, trailers and excellent book by Rachel Simon promised a touching story about the relationship between two sisters. Check out http://www.rachelsimon.com.This is a network TV movie, a genre seldom equated with great film-making. Needing to sell to advertisers, Hallmark is not known for edgy, innovative films. What they promise is what they delivered in "Riding the Bus With My Sister" - a touching story simply told, that did not manipulate for sympathy, but instead sought understanding of the challenges faced by those with developmental disabilities.This film is not going to make some aspiring film student (as one post derided) a great filmmaker. It's not going to be remembered in the annals of time...but if perhaps, through the effortless and realistic portrayal of Rosie O'Donnell, it inspires you to be a bit more patient and empathetic of someone with a developmental disability, then this film will have its own very worthwhile legacy.