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BEST MOVIE FOR ADULTS (NOMINEES)
Gravity (PG-13): 
It’s an epic just 90 minutes long, an out-of-this-world spectacle that makes us long for home even though we’re mere minutes away at the mall multiplex. Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, is a deceptively simple story about two souls lost in space, doing their best to get back to terra firma. But underneath this gripping movie there are deeper themes at play—the idea of death and rebirth, of loss and redemption. Here we meet an astronaut who’s living out of pure habit. And it’s only when it looks as though her breath might be taken away from her that she truly remembers what it’s like to not just survive, but live.
Instructions Not Included (PG-13): 
Sometimes a knock at your door changes everything. That’s what happens to Mexican playboy Valentín Bravo the day a woman arrives at his condo and announces the baby she’s holding is his. She hands the infant over and says she needs to pay the cab … but never returns. In a flash, the commitment-phobic ladies’ man becomes a father. Valentín tries to return the baby to her mother in Los Angeles. But the twist has him staying there and becoming the most deliriously doting dad imaginable. Until, that is, the girl’s mother reappears seven years later … and complicates everything. The heart of this poignant, tear-inducing Mexican melodrama is one of an unlikely father’s deep love for the little girl he comes to cherish more than anything.
Philomena (PG-13): 
Evil nuns, an agonizing birth, a tortured young women. Those are all good things—at least from Martin Sixsmith’s perspective. Sixsmith is a cynical British reporter who hopes to weave together a good human interest story that will earn him a little cash, and this scandal-loaded story seems just the ticket. To Philomena Lee, however, that difficult birth and those hard-eyed nuns are all a painful part of her past. A past that involved her being shipped off to an abbey when she was just a girl, pregnant and out of wedlock. And now some 50 years later, she wants nothing more than to find the child, her son who was taken from her and sold to an American family. She just hopes she can have enough faith to see the journey through. This well-acted dramedy suffers at times from some hard-edged Catholic criticism. But it doesn’t stay there as it tells the true story of a gentle woman of faith who reaches for a sense of peace and finds a pathway to forgiveness.
Saving Mr. Banks (PG-13): 
If author P.L. Travers had her way, Mary Poppins would have not sung nor danced, and she certainly would never have uttered the silly made-up word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. If Disney moviemakers had their way, they probably never would’ve met P.L. Travers. Yet in the midst of a prickly collaboration, Travers and Walt Disney himself manage to craft a classic film—and we come to understand something about the redemptive power of storytelling. Saving Mr. Banks is a study in contradictions—both sad and joyous, dark and dreamy. And as we watch Travers battle Disney and her own troubled past, we grapple with the stories we tell ourselves, too, about the wonderful loved ones who sometimes failed us.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (PG): 
Everyone daydreams. But for Walter Mitty, a quiet, conscientious manager of film negatives for LIFE magazine, his trance-like daydreams propel him into a realm more like something out of an Indiana Jones movie. But Walter’s life takes a turn toward real-life adventure when the negative for the magazine’s last print issue mysteriously disappears. Ever the conscientious employee, Walter’s determined to track it down—even if that means outracing volcanic ash in Iceland on a skateboard or trekking through the foothills of the Himalayas in search of the elusive photographer who took the picture. It’s a journey of discovery in more ways than one for Walter, whose secret life unexpectedly becomes his real life as he teaches us how to discover our own meaning and purpose in life.
Films in this category are targeting adults, and some of them certainly come with content concerns. But for this category we’re looking for movies with great moral messages coupled with content that’s not extreme. That’s why 12 Years a Slave—as important a movie as it is, and despite the profound issues it deals with—didn’t make our cut.
(All movie summaries are written by Plugged In reviewers Paul Asay, Adam Holz, Bob Hoose and Bob Waliszewski.)
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