Judy Dench

  • Six Minutes to Midnight (2020)

    Six Minutes to Midnight (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) I don’t often finish films in perplexity about the existence of said film, but Six Minutes to Midnight had me stumped. It’s a bizarre mixture of a low-key story, miscast lead and overbearing execution, and just isn’t as interesting as it thinks it is. If I have the film’s production history correct, it started as a vanity project for writer-actor Eddie Izzard (who wrote the script based on childhood hometown stories) and that explains a lot. Taking as a springboard the existence of an English finishing school for daughters of the Nazi elite in the weeks before the start of WW2, the film soon delves into spy-movie shenanigans, as Izzard plays a counter-espionage agent sent undercover as a teacher to find out more about another evil teacher and the Nazis’ dastardly plan to go back to Germany with somehow-acquired super-secret plans. It feels like a very lackadaisical justification for a spy thriller, and unfortunately, I never bought into it. That, in turn, made the overdone nature of suspenseful scenes more funny than impressive — by the time we’re in a night-time dogfight between planes to prevent the extraction of their Nazi students and their super-evil teacher, the only thing I kept thinking was “why can’t they just let the Nazis go back home? They’ll lose the war anyway.” Izzard seems wasted in a serious but not overly impressive role — sure, it shows range from his comic persona, but it’s as if they left two thirds of his personality on the shelf. Flat direction from Andy Goddard doesn’t help either, and there’s a limit to what even Judy Dench can do to rescue the result. At best unremarkable and at worst misguided, Six Minutes to Midnight seems destined to end up in the heap of WW2 film arcana: a disappointing curiosity unable to make the most of what it has at its disposal.

  • The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015)

    The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2017) Perhaps the biggest surprise of The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is how neatly it follows-up on the first film. Despite a few new characters and situations, subplots are carried through, the tone is consistent and nearly every character gets a role to play in the sequel. The film picks up not too long after the first, which means that you can see the two film back-to-back and it will feel like a whole. The portrait of India is pleasantly complicated as the story goes a bit beyond the surface impressions of the first film. Judy Dench once again takes on a substantial role, but the ensemble cast does give substantial characters to Maggie Smith (continuing a solid character arc), Bill Nighy (charming in a role that could have been irritating), Dev Patel and, newly introduced in the series, Richard Gere. While The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is slightly more formulaic than the already schematic original (all the way to climaxing at a wedding), it’s a decent-enough follow-up to the first film—those who were charmed by the first Exotic Marigold Hotel are likely to feel just as pleased with this one.

  • The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011)

    The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2017) Ensemble romantic comedies are a dime a dozen, but few of them tackle the topic of retiree romance as well as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. While I don’t entirely buy the premise (pensioners moving from Britain to India for their last few years), it does make for a clever way to put familiar characters in new situations. As they navigate the unfamiliarity of modern India, our cast of character grows from their new surroundings, we viewers get a good dose of exoticism and various subplots are left free to develop. A good ensemble casts helps—While Judy Dench and Tom Wilkinson are the standouts here, Bill Nighy manages to make a weak-willed character sympathetic and Maggie Smith gets the difficult role of a stone-cold racist changing her ways after immersion in a foreign culture. Dev Patel also gets a good role as the young Indian man trying to hold a plan together despite the actions of his western guests. Colorful, sympathetic and gently upholding admirable values, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is the kind of pleasant surprise that British cinema does so well. It’s not spectacular, but it works well enough.