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The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
This comedy/drama was such a surprise runaway hit that a sequel is due out. A group of British pensioners move to a retirement hotel in India that's run by the lovable but hapless young Sonny. The pensioners, for various reasons, either can't afford to retire back home in Britain or need to escape. But they're not all optimistic about seeing their remaining years out making India, especially after they see the hotel's state of dilapidation, which Sonny is eager to address. Eventually, through various adventures and misadventures, everyone finds their rightful way forward, including Sonny's beloved Marigold Hotel.
The Marigold is actually the hotel and former tribal chieftain palace known as Ravla Khempur, located in Khempur in India's colorful Rajasthan, about an hour outside of Udaipur, an equestrian hotel in a quiet, rural setting that tourists tend to pass by. Ravla Khempur was chosen to star as the Marigold Hotel because it has become slightly rundown, though not to the extent that it appears to be in the film. In real life, the hotel offers visitors horseback riding, camel safaris and village sightseeing tours.
Bugsy
Gangster Bugsy Siegel travels from his native New York City to Los Angeles, where he meets and falls in love with Virginia Hill, meanwhile killing and hurting anyone who dares cross him. Then a trip to a run-down gambling spot in the desert called Las Vegas gives him his life's purpose. Based loosely on a true story, Bugsy tells the tale of how Sin City was born and all those brightly lit hotels came to be.
Casino
Scorsese depicts Las Vegas in all its glamour and cruelty and recounts the story of the Mafia's involvement in the creation of its casinos throughout the 1970s and 1980s through the eyes of two mobsters. Ace Rothstein and Nicky Santoro move to Sin City to make it big, and wind up being each other's foil. Ace takes on the Tangiers casino and Nicky, his childhood buddy, takes charge of roughing up the locals. But each falls victim to his tragic flaw: Ace falls for the hustler Ginger while Nicky is caught up in drugs and violence.
Grand Hotel
"People come, people go. Nothing ever happens," says the sweet but alcoholic Dr. Otternschlag, one of the very different guests staying at Berlin's most luxurious hotel. The doctor misses the fact that Baron von Geigern (John Barrymore) is broke and trying to steal the pearls of eccentric dancer Grusinskya (Greta Garbo), and that he winds up stealing her heart instead...along with the heart of powerful businessman Preysing's mistress, Flaemmchen the lowly stenographer (Joan Crawford). Meanwhile, Preysing verbally abuses Kringelein, a lowly bookkeeper who is terminally ill, but it is Kringelein who gets the riches and the girl in the end.
Holiday Inn
At a country inn only open for Christmas and New Year's, a crooner (Bing Crosby) competes with his hoofer buddy (Fred Astaire) for the lovely Linda Mason after a femme fatale rejects him.
Maid in Manhattan
In this romantic comedy filmed in New York's Roosevelt Hotel, Jennifer Lopez stars as a single mother from the Bronx who works as a maid in a luxury hotel in Manhattan. One day, as she is trying on the clothing of one of the hotel's socialite guests (Natasha Richardson), she happens to meet a senatorial candidate (Ralph Fiennes) and they fall for each other when suddenly they are thrown together for one night. But soon enough, the maid's true identity is revealed. Will true love prevail? No spoilers given here!
Motel Hell
A farmer down in the Deep South with a motel attached to his property and a bitter unmarried sister takes to kidnapping unsuspecting travelers and burying them in his garden as compost for the veggies he grows for his roadside stand. The problem is, they're not all dead in this slasher movie send-up.
Plaza Suite
Neil Simon is at his best in this film version of his play, which features three separate acts set in the same suite at New York's Plaza Hotel with Walter Matthau in a triple role. In the first, a wife tries to get her inattentive husband to work on their failing marriage. In the second, a film producer tries to convince a former lover of his worth. And in the third, a husband and wife must get their confused daughter out of the bathroom in time for her wedding.
Psycho
Janet Leigh stars as an embezzler on the lam and heading toward Mexico when she stops at Bates Motel for a little rest and a shower. Little does she know that proprietor Anthony Perkins ensures that the guests who check in here don't check out again... And ever since Psycho came out in 1960, Bernard Herrmann's freaky all-strings score has made motel guests the world over suspicious, if not terrified of shower stalls.
Room Service
Groucho is a poor theatrical producer who must trick the hotel efficiency expert out of evicting him from his tiny closet of a room--which hilariously fills up with visits--and secure a financier for his new play.
The Shining
If ever there was an excuse for a writer not to hole up in silence for the winter to finish a book, this is it. Jack Nicholson stars as the writer who is taken over by an evil ghostly presence who convinces him to "correct" his wife (Shelley Duval) and psychic son. This film will make you think twice about staying at large, isolated hotels with long, carpeted hallways...
Vertigo
Jimmy Stewart is a retired San Francisco detective with a bad case of acrophobia who sets out to investigate the weird activities of an old friend's wife (Kim Novak) and winds up falling for her... And he keeps right on nearly falling off a lot of high places while he works to solve the mystery of the mysterious Madeleine who is staying at the McKittrick Hotel (actually the historic Portman Mansion on Gough Street).
White Christmas
A renowned song-and-dance team (Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye) team up with a sister act (Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen) to save the failing Vermont of their former commanding general, and the four of them fall in love.
Barton Fink
New York intellectual playwright Barton Fink (John Turturro) heads for Hollywood in 1941 to write a script for a Wallace Beery picture. But while staying at the creepy Hotel Earle, Fink develops writer's block. His neighbor, an insurance salesman (John Goodman), tries to help him out, but a strange sequence of events takes him even further from his work in this early Coen Bros. film.
Charade
Audrey Hepburn is a widow being pursued throughout Paris by several strange men who are after the fortune her murdered husband had stolen, not least of which are two mysterious Americans played by Cary Grant and Walter Matthau. The Hotel Maxim in the Latin Quarter is the setting for lots of hijinks and blossoming love between Hepburn and Grant.
Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
Ah, Jacques Tati! Monsieur Hulot goes to a seaside hotel for the summer and, as charmingly as always, causes a lot of havoc among the guests. In real life, the town in which the sleepy seaside resort, Saint Marc sur Mer, served as the film's setting, is fighting not to get wiped off the map of France.
Lost in Translation
A has-been movie star (Bill Murray) arrives in Tokyo to make a booze commercial and forms an unlikely friendship with the neglected young wife of a traveling photographer (Scarlett Johansson). The Park Hyatt Tokyo is the center of their sad, listless existences.
To Catch a Thief
In this most glamorous of Hitchcock films, Cary Grant is a reformed jewel thief who is suspected of having returned to stealing and must find the real thief in order to prove his innocence. Conveniently, he falls in love with a debutante played by Grace Kelly. The setting is the InterContinental Carlton in Cannes, a luxury hotel built in 1911, which coincidentally was the scene of a real-life $136 million jewel theft in the summer of 2013.
