johnqacts
This is far & away the best work Murphy has done in many years. Wonderful story. Great to see Bruce Beresford directing again. All of the girls & women playing Charlie are very good. Don't miss this one & then tell your friends.
Mac Brandes
Pleasantly surprising and good. It's obvious what you're getting into before seeing Mr. Church. A black man becomes a prominent figure in a white family. What the writers and actors do from there decides how the audience will react. They nailed it. There's so much depth to the two main characters. In the end you love them both. This movie did everything set out to do, except probably make more money at the box office.
rickiemjames
Eddie gets so close to the comfort zone.Huge respect Mr. Murphy , you are so close! this is a very engaging drama- the heaviness between the players is very well written. Great work "writer'! Where it drops is the accents for the times. And how underprivileged, talked to, no offense "white people".I worked for the US government as a temp, My boss was not "white" I had huge respect for that man, but since he went to collage in the days of oppression, I felt a sense of fear, which I never endused.The Director missed this!Sadly I still see this today with older people that lived in that time.
schell-7
Yes, this exquisite melodrama places Eddie Murphy in a role of loving service ("Godliness," in Christian theology of grace) while grounding him as an individual with his own problems in finding love. Everything is "right" about the film--not a wasted, poorly lit or purposeless shot. Like the Billie Holiday song about loneliness that it references, the film is that perfectly constructed jazz solo that plays itself out once, awakening buried emotions and eliciting tears of joy. What we experience is the love from a parent or caring friend and a desire to reciprocate it--a momentary solace at discovering our commonly shared humanity.Yes, the film is sentimental and manipulative. It knows the emotions it's after and the audience it's targeting. But it's not the sappy or unearned emotion of a formulaic "Patch Adams." Early in "Mr. Church" I became aware that I hadn't seen cinematography like this until the stunning close-ups of food, books and characters made me realize how inadequate most films--including television dramas-- are at engaging our senses and our interest without car wrecks, assassinations, bloody bodies and ample sex. "Mr. Church" uses a screen play that any literate adult with a memory will relate to in the first five minutes. If you grew up with a loving mother or with books that are classics or with adults who sacrificed for you--or with loved ones who died, you will respond to this film. As subjective, thinking beings we can experience "deep thoughts" and invent marvelous new things, but we can't be anyone else but ourselves--a necessarily lonely state, lightened by our awareness of others we have known, present and past. That's the only saving grace that any of us--rich or poor, black or white, straight or gay, famous or ineligible for Wikipedia, born in the USA or somewhere else--can hope for at the moment of our last glimpse of the dying light.
AD
