To bastardise a Roger Murtaugh quote - I’m too young for this shit.

Perhaps this review will be a little on the harsh side, particularly when I am obviously not its target demographic, but I find it rather depressing that an impressive ensemble cast is wasted on such lightweight fluff. The story - a group of 60+ Brits travel to India to spend their twilight years in luxury yet find the hotel to be anything but - is the sort of tired rubbish you’d find propping up the TV scheduling on a lazy Sunday evening. So what we get is a range of one-note characters each fulfilling their respective roles in the story. What a shame then that you cast…

The Box Office Bashing Season: 2003 to 2014

Oh look, Maggie Smith's a racist. I wonder if, by any chance, she might have changed her outlook by the end of the film.

There's just nothing to this film. It's a really bizarre comedy drama in that it's neither funny nor particularly dramatic. It just meanders its way through its over-long running time, have someone inevitably and tragically cark it, have someone else being presumed to have carked it, and that's it on the drama front.

Then have it be simultaneously patronising and admiring of India and Indian culture, throw in the usual jibes about Indian food giving you the shits, have the hotel owner be a gibbering moron who has…

Everything will be all right in the end... if it's not all right then it's not yet the end.

Some of the best british actors alive are assembled in a film about retirees moving to India, and feeling shocked by the culture differences.
A film packed with such a talented cast was expected to be, at least, watchable and funny. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is extremely boring, predictable and cliched.
John Madden has no idea of what he is doing throughout the movie because he doesn't care about the characters. It's just a mix of people, with no significant development and it's very hard to feel connected to them. Every moment of, let's call it, stronger emotions feels very…

The power of an actor, or in this case actors, can sometimes carry through a piece of work that without them wouldn't particularly stand out, and that's very much the case with The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (for the Elderly & Beautiful). John Madden's movie, based on the novel These Foolish Things by Deborah Moggach, is directed with an elegant, cultured, charming malaise and very much has a script to match; his piece casually ambles it's way through a tale of senior citizens on a voyage of self-discovery as they trade in a set of dour, middle-class lives for the late vestiges of the Raj in Jaipur, a land of crumbled old buildings, eternal sunsets, noisy & loud streets and err... call…

Nel mondo del cinema esistono diversi tipi di film: quelli tronfi e pieni di sé, che si autocompiacciono di un manierismo esasperato; quelli che vogliono cambiare il mondo ma, in realtà, mirano solo a gonfiare il portafogli del loro autore; quelli tuttomuscoli; quelli che si credono di sinistra ma sono stati finanziati da Murdoch o Berlusconi; quelli che si credono un capolavoro ma son men che mediocri.

E poi ci sono loro: i film onesti, magari non capolavori ma che quando hai finito di vederli il primo istinto che ti prende non è quello di cavar gli occhi al regista ma di applaudire. Li chiamo “film onesti”, piccole perle nascoste nel mare di una produzione mondiale di incredibili vaccate.

Marigold…

83/100

i'm not sure why i love this as much as i do.

i think it has a lot to do with the charming cast. i mean there's Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, both still on top of their A game, and know how to make the most of their relatively bland parts. one is a seemingly lonely elderly lady who doesn't know what to do with herself without her husband. and another is a set in her ways racist ways, but gets stuck dealing with it because she needs a hip replacement surgery.

then we have Tom Wilkinson, Bill Night, Celia Imrie and Penelope Wilton, and they are each so well cast here, and they all have great chemistry…