Philomena

Directed by Stephen Frears

(PG-13)

***

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Judi Dench’s performance in this deftly handled drama is “so quietly moving that it feels lit from within,” said Stephen Holden in The New York Times. Playing Philomena Lee, a real-life Irishwoman who 50 years ago was a teenage mother forced by the Catholic Church to give up her 3-year-old son for adoption, Dench re-enacts Lee’s recent search for her lost child. As she does, her most impressive feat is making us believe in Lee’s capacity to forgive. Steve Coogan, who co-wrote the screenplay, co-stars as a journalist who aids in the hunt after the convent that once took advantage of Lee offers her no assistance. Coogan’s professional brusqueness helps create some odd-couple comedy as the pair pursues a lead to Washington, D.C., said Claudia Puig in USA Today. “Only a few plot holes keep the film from greatness.” In fact, it’s “overcalculating and occasionally coarse,” said David Edelstein in New York magazine. But director Stephen Frears wisely keeps the movie from becoming “an anti-Catholic harangue,” and given the importance of its story, “we should count its existence as a blessing.”