Director: Lasse Hallstrom
Starring: Helen Mirren, Om Puri, Manish Dayal, Charlotte Le Bon
The Hundred-Foot Journey is pretty much exactly the movie you think it's going to be. It's a gentle, unchallenging, workmanlike film with low stakes but plenty of charm. That's not a criticism, incidentally; the world of cinema needs those types of films just as much as it needs the enormously ambitious productions that flood the marketplace towards the end of the year. In the grand scheme of things, The Hundred-Foot Journey is a very minor work, but it's also a refreshing film in that it does something that very few other movies do by giving voice and agency to characters who are usually relegated to the supporting ranks. The Hundred-Foot Journey isn't going to change the world and it isn't reinventing the wheel, but it's an often delightful trifle that delivers what it promises.
