The film depicts the life of Catholic missionary Francesca Cabrini, portrayed by Cristiana Dell'Anna, as she encounters resistance to her charity and business efforts in New York City.

Cabrini migrates from Italy to New York with her fellow Sisters to take care of poor Italian immigrants, aiding an ineffective priest in the Five Points area.

Cabrini and comrades hear pounding on the door, and the voice of a pimp named Geno shouting that he doesn't allow roomers for free and that they must not sleep there again.

Cabrini occasionally ventures underground at night to find missing children, at the expense of her deteriorating health; some good Samaritans convey her to a physician, Dr. Murphy, who tells her she likely has only two years to live.

She determines to establish a first-rate hospital, and buys an old building, with the aid of wealthy men from immigrant communities of Irish, Italian, and Jewish descent.

When she holds an Italian-American festival fundraiser with famous singer Enrico DiSalvo, the police, spewing racial slurs, shut it down, and Cabrini is arrested.

In the United States and Canada, Cabrini was released alongside Kung Fu Panda 4 and Imaginary, set for a projected gross of about $8.5 million from 2,840 theaters in its opening weekend.

[13] RogerEbert.com's Tomris Laffly, rating the film 3 out of 4 stars, praised it as "the kind of middlebrow, big-screen period piece that used to occupy our theater screens regularly just a few decades ago".

She concluded "If the name Alejandro Monteverde is familiar to your ears, it's likely because of last year's absurd and highly controversial box office hit Sound of Freedom.

The Italian actress Cristiana Dell'Anna turns in a stunningly effective, movie-star performance in a film that is reminiscent of old-fashioned religious biopics such as The Song of Bernadette and Joan of Arc.

"[18] Conversely, IndieWire's David Ehrlich rated Cabrini a C-, criticizing it as "A stodgy, histrionic, and impossibly dull biopic that drags on for more than 140 minutes despite being thinner than a stained glass window."

He went on to say "Its dialogue is a stale mess of empty slogans in search of a character to support them, its cinematography smothers turn of the century New York under a mustard cloud of digital sepia, and its structure — credited to both Monteverde and screenwriter Rod Barr — is so absent a convincing shape that it might as well be a person with three arms or a t‍–‍shirt that only has sleeves.