Wordiezett So much average

WasAnnon Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

Bryan Kluger Reese Witherspoon has had quite the year in 2014. She will probably be nominated for an Oscar for her work in 'Wild', but earlier this year, she starred in yet another film based on a true story called 'The Good Lie', which focused on the orphaned Sudanese children from South Africa, known as the Lost Boys, who came to America to start over and have a chance at a good life. Director Philippe Falardeau (who hasn't done much) directed from a script from Margaret Nagle (Boardwalk Empire) this sweet film that is mostly enjoyable, but never quite hikes over that mountain.Maybe the reason is that this film is full of those usual emotional big moments that are full of cheese that you can't help but laugh when you should be shedding a tear. And this happens so often that it becomes more of a problem rather than an emotional journey. If producers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard were on-set producers through the whole shoot, I'm sure things would have been handled differently. 'The Good Lie' follows four friends, Mamere (Arnold Oceng), Paul (Emmanuel Jal), Abital (Kuoth Wiel), and Jeremiah (Ger Duany), who were dealt a very bad hand growing up in their Sudanese village.During the turmoil and war over there, these four kids were forced out of their homes along with thousands of other kids to walk thousands of miles in search of another home without the help from adults. These kids ended up in a refugee camp, which was not so good to put it lightly. While there for a a number years, they grew up, however America stepped in and allowed for some of these lost people to come to America to have a better life. Three of the four kids were all located to Kansas City, although the movie was shot in Atlanta, where Carrie (Reese Witherspoon), a fiery young woman starts to look after and help these "lost boys" transition into the American life.From here, Witherspoon takes center stage as she struggles with dealing with this new aspect of her life. While she seems bothered at first by these four guys, the usual cheesy melodramatic plot points turn her into the woman with the heart of gold. It's just something that we've seen done a million times before, and here, it has a high cheese factor in certain moments. That being said, there are some great characters with some very funny moments throughout. And even though the story has more than enough big dramatic emotional moments that stink of cheese, for the most part, the film is satisfying to a certain degree.The sudanese actors are all excellent here and do a good job showing the emotional stress their characters went through and what their struggling with by being in America and away from their homeland. Witherspoon also turns in a great performance, but it seems a tiny bit over-the-top. And Corey Stoll (House of Cards) steals every scene he's in. 'The Good Lie' isn't the most powerful film to tell this story we've seen before, but it should satisfy the family friendly crowd.

3xHCCH In the 1980s there was a major civil war in the Sudan causing several children to lose their families. Left on their own devices, these kids had to travel hundreds of miles in order to reach safe haven beyond the border. This film follows the story of one such set of displaced and orphaned children, dubbed by aid workers and media as "The Lost Boys of Sudan". After their eldest brother Theo sacrificed himself to be captured by soldiers, Mamere and his sister Abital were able to reach the refugee camp in Kenya on their own, together with another set of brothers they met along the way, Jeremiah and Paul. Several years later, all four of them, now young adults, were luckily picked to be among those to be relocated to the United States. In Kansas City, Missouri, the boys met employment counselor Carrie Davis, who helped them settle in their new home and find jobs. There, they discovered not only new comforts of life and new opportunities, but also new challenges they had to face. While Mamere worked hard to go to medical school, he constantly worried about his sister Abital who was separated from him at the airport and sent to live in Boston with a foster family. Deeper down, he also continued to be haunted by the sacrifice his brother Theo did for them to live.Reese Witherspoon gets top billing, but she is not the main character of the film at all. Her Carrie goes out of her way to help the Sudanese boys get settled into their new lives. She helps them solve various problems by pulling some bureaucratic strings. But it is still the boys themselves, particularly Mamere, who make the big decisions in their lives. Despite her star status, Witherspoon never drew attention to herself in this role. She gracefully gives her African co-stars the spotlight they deserved.Arnold Oceng plays the lead character Mamere with dignified restraint. It is his performance upon which the whole movie revolved around. He was able to gain our sympathy towards his plight and the various demons he had to face. The actors who played Abital (a radiant Kuoth Wiel), Jeremiah (Ger Duany) and Paul (Emmanuel Jal) all suffered through the Sudanese Civil War in real life, thus accounting for the affecting authenticity in their performances. The young actors who played these characters as child refugees were similarly very effective in their portrayals. Honestly I was not too excited to see this film thinking it would be another one of those "White Savior" films like "The Blind Side" or "Dangerous Minds", where a white man saves a poor person of color out of his miserable condition. At the end though, my fears were unfounded. This turned out to be quite engaging despite its very serious topic. Aside from some awkward moment of humor in the middle as the brothers were adjusting to American life which felt forced, the rest of the film with its theme of brotherly devotion was heartwarming and inspirational. While its overwhelming positivity is wonderful, it may also be seen by some as its main drawback. 7/10.

srsandsberry A lot of stories based on real-life stories don't feel like real life. They feel like a story reborn within a storyteller's imagination to make it somehow more appealing, a better package. Not "The Good Lie." It feels real. And it engenders real emotion. If you can watch this movie and not laugh and feel warm at the heartwarming parts — as we do in real life — and cry at the heartbreaking moments, then you're not watching. You're texting or having a conversation, or thinking about what you're going to do this weekend. If you give yourself over to this film, it will absolutely pull you inside, wrap itself around you and touch your heart. You will laugh. And yes, you will cry. This story puts a very human face on a very human tragedy, that otherwise we might too often look at simply as a headline on an inside page of the newspaper that we pass over to get to something that isn't so hard to fathom.I applaud the people who made this film and thank them. Any filmmaker on the planet would be proud to have been associated with this. I know I would be, and all I am is a guy who stumbled upon it on HBO. What a find.

TxMike Some years ago I saw a documentary on the subject, but this movie is a fictional story inspired by the real events. In fact its content was run by real survivors of the Sudan wars of the 1980s to make sure everything was realistic.The title is from "Huck Finn" and we encounter it three times, it means a lie which is appropriate for the good of someone else, maybe even to save their life.The story starts in the 1980s and we see how whole villages were wiped out by gunfire and burning. In this tale three brothers and their sister in South Sudan manage to run away and survive, then head East towards Ethiopia where they had been told they could get refuge and food. The only transportation for most Sudanese was walking so they thought nothing of making such a trip of several hundred miles, and with little food or fresh water.They eventually meet up with many others headed south to Kenya so they joined them. Their fate was a refugee camp where they could get food, medical care, and safety, but many of them stayed there for years, some never leaving this refugee camp.This movie concerns the three brothers and their sister who received the opportunity to travel to the USA where they would find work and integrate themselves into society. But there was a problem, they had to separate the boys, headed for Kansas City, from their sister headed for Boston, because of the availability of foster homes.So that is the main story here, their relocation to a land of strange customs. They are assigned to Reese Witherspoon as Carrie who would help them find jobs. As she realized how far they had to go in this new environment she became much more involved and eventually to try to reunite the boys with their sister.This is a very good movie and brings home the big issue of internal strife and displacement, not only in South Sudan but in many countries all over the world. Aside from Reese, many of the actors were either men who had actually been young boys in South Sudan or men whose parents were.