Drama

• Title: The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
• IMDb: link

2011’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel boasted a cast that was able to elevate its source material to create a likable, if lightweight, film about a group of elderly travelers finding a second home in India by choosing to stay in “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for the the Elderly and Beautiful.”

The sequel returns most of the cast, and director John Madden, but almost none of the charm of the first film. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel wastes it cast and beautiful backdrop with enough romcom cliches, misunderstandings, overreactions, and poor judgement to fill half-a-dozen Three’s Company‘s episodes or three Kate Hudson movies.

The drama surrounding the hotel this time around centers around Sonny Kapoor’s (Dev Patel) impending marriage to Sunaina (Tina Desai) and plans to grow his brand with the acquisition of a second hotel. Neither is going as smoothly as Sonny would like leading to the script slowly turning the charming young man into an intensely dislikable character and his bride into a woman too dense to understand the basic nature of the man she’s about to marry.

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• Title: McFarland, USA
• IMDb: link

Miracle. The Rookie. Cool Runnings. Remember the Titans. Walt Disney Films has a talent finding true stories and adapting them into surprisingly moving films. Hell, even Eight Below was better than it had any right to be. Sure sometimes the efforts limp to the finish line (remember Secretariat?), but more often than not the tales of struggle, perseverance, and overcoming great odds turn out to be solid family films.

Based on the true story of troubled sports coach Jim White who took a job in the only place that would hire him, Kevin Costner stars as a man struggling with not being able to better support his family who, despite their initial distrust of the predominantly Mexican-American town, eventually come to think of McFarland, California as home.

The story follows a basic pattern as White and his family (Maria Bello, Morgan Saylor, Elsie Fisher) come to embrace the town made up of mostly fruit pickers including a group of young kids (Carlos Pratts, Johnny Ortiz, Ramiro Rodriguez, Rafael Martinez, Hector Duran, Sergio Avelar, Michael Aguero) who White will turn into a cross country team.

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• Title: A Most Violent Year
• IMDb: link

I’ve never been a big fan of gangster movies. Writer/director J.C. Chandor A Most Violent Year, however, is more a character study than a focus on the questionable business practices of a successful immigrant businessman (Oscar Isaac) during one the most violent winter’s of New York City’s history.

All things considered, Abel Morales (Isaac) is actually a good guy whose ambitions to enlarge the business leave him vulnerable to attacks from his competitors and investigations by the police. He also must deal with the ruthlessness of his wife (Jessica Chastain) and the mistakes of one of his drivers (Elyes Gabel).

A Most Violent Year is a well-made film that, even if it isn’t as satisfying as I’d like, has plenty to recommend. The entire film is built around Isaac’s performance which doesn’t disappoint. Chastain is scary at times in the role of Isaac’s wife and the daughter of a gangster (whose name gets dropped often but never makes an appearance leaving a large piece of the couple’s lives unexplored). Scorpion‘s Elyes Gabel is put to good use as the eager but distrustful immigrant who wants nothing more than to become Abel.

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