The Help

Directed by Tate Taylor

(PG-13)

***

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It’s hard to imagine a better adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s popular novel, said David Germain in the Associated Press. “Provocative without turning preachy, tender without tumbling into sentimentality, The Help is above all enormously enjoyable.” Like the 2009 best seller, the film centers on a white writer in the early-1960s Deep South who faces friction from her socialite friends when she begins interviewing black maids for a book about their experiences working in white homes. The film finds almost nothing new to say about the Jim Crow era, said Kirk Honeycutt in The Hollywood Reporter. Though it adroitly captures the anxieties of the period, it “verges uncomfortably into cliché” with its pat depictions of monstrous society women and their noble servants. Yet director Tate Taylor “brings out the best” in his trio of female stars, said David Denby in The New Yorker. As the featured maids, Viola Davis is a moral force and Octavia Spencer has “wicked timing.” Thanks also to protagonist Emma Stone, there are scenes here “so moving and well acted” that “any objection to what’s second-rate seems to matter less as the movie goes on.”