The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

This good-natured crowd-pleaser from John Madden (Shakespeare in Love; Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown) is primarily a charming field day for a small host of veteran British actors. The story, drawn from a novel by Deborah Moggach, sends a motley assortment of hard-pressed Anglo senior citizens off to a cut-rate retirement home in India. Their number includes a grieving widow (Judy Dench), a bickering married couple (Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton), a much-married lady (Celia Imrie) boldly seeking yet another (preferably wealthy) husband, a retired judge (Tom Wilkinson) who is gay and returning to the scene of his youth, an exultantly randy old gentleman (Ronald Pickup), and a crotchety ex-nanny (Maggie Smith) who’s getting an outsourced hip replacement. Late-blooming romances mingle with a medley of financial and medical issues. Individual dilemmas get a miscellany of resolutions, but the film as a whole gathers itself around the problems of Sonny (Dev Patel from Slumdog Millionaire), whose courtship of lovely Sunaina (Tena Desae) and amateurish management of the hotel draws the ire of his family and of his domineering mother in particular. Cinemark 14 and Paradise Cinema 7. Rated PG-13.