The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) - Elderly Brits meet India in Madden's delightful best film to date

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1 Time Film Excess Nominee:


Best Supporting Actress: Maggie Smith (lost to Agnieszka Grochowska for In Darkness)

The ensemble-stressing poster for John Madden's The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

QUICK REVIEW:

A group of Third Aged Brits travel to India, where they are to live in a cheap home for the elderly, which turns out to be more unfinished than they had imagined.

Best Exotic is a surprisingly good film; an adaptation of Deborah Moggach's (Driving in the Dark (1988)) These Foolish Things (2004) by Ol Parker (The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015)), it has well-written characters and enough stories for several films, but it somehow manages to balance them all in first-rate fashion. English director John Madden's (The Debt (2010)) film also has funny, spot-on India/England observations and an ensemble cast of exceedingly lovable actors:
Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire (2008)) is charming and funny as the Indian host-proprietor; Tom Wilkinson (In the Bedroom (2001)), Judi Dench (Philomena (2013)), Bill Nighy (Notes on a Scandal (2006)) and Penelope Wilton (Match Point (2005)) each play their parts very real and are just super. - And Maggie Smith (Quartet (2012)) is simply divine as the curmudgeon, who SPOILER makes the greatest change of them all.
The film is a little thick at one junction and sort of stretches its dough a little to SPOILER afford us its happy ending. - But what of it, since we really want it.
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is one of the most wonderfully appealing movies of the year.

Related post:

2011 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III] 

Two of the first ladies of British cinema, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith in John Madden's The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Londoner Dev Patel is great in John Madden's The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Watch the wonderful trailer for the film here

Cost: 10 mil. $
Box office: 136.8 mil. $
= Huge hit
[Best Exotic, which was filmed partly on location in India, was first shown at the Sorrento cinema trade show in 2011 and was publicly released in early 2012. The film was a smash especially in countries related to Britain; in the UK it made a whopping 31 mil. $ (the 4th highest grossing picture of 2012 there); it was 2012's third highest grossing film in New Zealand (4.4 mil. $) and Australia (21.2 mil. $). It made 46.4 mil. $ (34 % of the total gross) in the US.]

What do you think of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel?
Is Madden's 2015 sequel also good?