Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

A lot of fun.

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

'Philomena' tells the fascinating true story of Philomena Lee and her 50 year search for her son, who was given away against her will by Catholic nuns. The film follows Philomena and a journalist, Martin Sixsmith, who assists her in her attempt to locate her missing son.Everything about this film is excellent. Judi Dench delivers an outstanding, heartfelt and I would say Oscar-worthy performance as Philomena. The rest of the cast, including Steve Coogan as Martin Sixsmith, are also excellent. A story like Philomena's deserves the very best script and acting, and I'm pleased they did the story justice.Overall, 'Philomena' is an excellent biographical film that I would highly recommend. No fake Hollywood nonsense, just a real story told exactly how it should be. 'Philomena' is a fascinating film.

The search for a lost child is always filled with mystery, but in the case of Judi Dench as the title character, she seems to see her son's life happening long after they were separated. Taken to an Irish convent where mostly cruel nuns took in unwed mothers, sold the babies to wealthy Americans and made them work off the "hospitality" through hard labor. With the help of a BBC reporter, Dench travels to Washington DC where the truth is revealed, and all is not happy once she finds out.While the novel tells the story mostly through the son's eyes, this is told through Philomena's, obviously to focus on the wonderful Dench. It's not a story of the evils of the church, but one woman's determination to reach out to her greatest love, an adorable little boy who went far in life, but not without a price.The way this story is told in other hands would be a lifetime movie, but with Dench, it is a personal story, a character study, a tale of redemption and finality, and obviously, a lesson in what great acting is all about. Dench is pretty much the whole film, glowing even under the most tragic of circumstances. One should not see the negativity about the church here, just one aspect of a huge organization that has a history of both good and evil.

This BBC film has everything I would want for a great movie. Martin Sixsmith's book is powerfully told. The screenplay is outstanding. The Direction by Stephen Frears is done at an excellent pace. Judi Dench and Steve Coogan make a power team as Philomena and Martin Sixsmith. The supporting cast is fine, but this film belongs too these main characters. Story is about a young teenager (Philomena played by Sophie Kennedy Clark) who has an erotic encounter with a young man, becomes pregnant and is taken in by a convent where she delivers a baby boy. The nuns, in 1952, were in the business of delivering single underage teenage girls babies and then selling them for adoption to rich folks (mostly Americans) in Scotland. The location settings for this in Northern Ireland, the UK, and the US make for many great settings as beckoned for the story. Baed upon a true story, Philomena, 50 years after having her baby, wants to find him after the nuns sold her little boy away from her over 50 years prior. Sixsmith, a former BBC reporter who has been fired, gets involved to try and help find Philomena's son. This takes them from Rocrea in Scotland, to the United States. While watching the first half of the movie, the viewer feels like she will, and there will be a happy ending.Then, she finds out her son is dead, and why. Actually Michael Sixsmith leads her to find out where her son is. Rocrea nunnery in Scotland is no help and is actually the ultimate road block to Philomena finding out where her son was and who he was sold too.The emotion of the story is raised by the process, very old fashioned, balanced against the group of folks wanting to learn who he really was. It is a story we can not put down and at slightly over 90 minutes does not let the viewer escape without touching moments in the film. It is all quite adorable really.

Based on a true story, 'Philomena' (on TV, 26 02 16) mixes documentary realism, a mystery story and comedy with consummate success. At its heart is the striking contrast between the journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), portrayed as a cynical 'hack' and atheist, and Philomena Lee (Judi Dench), a devout Catholic, seemingly simple yet thoroughly clear-headed.The story looks back to 1952, when Philomena's father sent her to a convent as punishment for having a child out of wedlock. It portrays Ireland at that time far more harshly than 'Brooklyn' (also set in 1952). The nuns subject Philomena and other girls to a shockingly Spartan regime reminiscent of pre-Revolutionary French convents in Diderot's novel 'La religieuse' (filmed most recently in 2013). Worse still, they have no compunction in selling the girls' babies. It's sobering to think that their appallingly misguided practices could have taken place in such relatively recent times.Sister Hildegarde (Barbara Jefford), superior of the convent in 1952, embodies one of three variations on the theme of Catholicism. She is an unyielding fundamentalist, for whom sexual relations are 'carnal incontinence'. At the opposite extreme, Martin Sixsmith is a lapsed Catholic who bitterly detests the Church. Philomena, by contrast with both those characters, not only keeps her faith but practises it – heroically so in one case. So the story is essentially fair to the Catholic Church.By the time of the main action, 2002, Sister Hildegarde is very old and frail. Mother Barbara (Ruth McCabe), her successor at the time, is completely different: quite young, dressed in an unobtrusive habit and caring in her manner. It's also striking that one of the nuns (played by Wunmi Mosaku) is black.Sixsmith has temporarily abandoned his specialist field of Russian history for investigative journalism. In that role, he's accountable to his editor, who is really no more humane than Sister Hildegarde. When he tells her on the phone that Philomena is 'in bits' over her long-lost son's fate in the USA, she crows with delight.His investigation makes the film partly a mystery story. Its outcome is a great surprise, linking Ireland and the USA well after 1952.Judi Dench is thoroughly convincing as a talkative, warm-hearted and sometimes slightly embarrassing Irish woman. One of her most endearing traits is the way she repeats the name Martin in her conversations with him. Like her, Steve Coogan achieves some very subtle changes of attitude, mood and pace. There's just one touch, I think, of Alan Partridge when Sixsmith makes an awkwardly suggestive quip to Mother Barbara on seeing photos of Jane Russell and Jayne Mansfield.This film struck me as profoundly moving and I felt the tears welling up more than once. Yet another fine piece of work from Stephen Frears, and full credit to Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope for the screenplay.