"Ben Is Back" is a new American English-language movie that premiered in 2018 and took until January 2019 to make it here to Germany. It runs for over 100 minutes and was written and directed by Peter Hedges. So it is certainly no coincidence that his son Lucas plays the central male character. He is a recent Oscar nominee with an underdog shot this year too, probably rather for another film than this one here, but surprisingly not too many are talking about him despite him being among the mostg talented his age group has to offer, perhaps because most people talk about Chalamet these days who has another film in the Oscar race this year too again. Anyway, back to this one here. Hedges may be the male lead, but he does not have the most screen time. This goes easily to Julia Roberts, who really has all the material too, so it is almost a bit surprising she did not make bigger waves this awards season and another nomination seems highly unlikely for her at the Oscars, perhaps because the film is pretty simple story-wise for 100 minutes even. A drug-addicted boy comes back to his mother and her (partly new) family and the two bond again. Then the family's dog is abducted and the rest is a rescue mission that may bring everybody to their limits again. That''s the film in short. I could write a whole lot about individual scenes, but I will not do it so much now. Instead lets take a look at Roberts' character again. Her baddass moments feel cringeworthy. She has mildly funny scenes, like the toilet one very early on, but also real drama, her desperation when her son manages to trick her and get away and finally of course when she tries to revive him. By the way how did the dog really ran exactly this way? A bit unrealistic. But yeah, the dog's fate and also the son's fate at the very end make it obvious that despite all the drama, this is still a bit of a feel-good movie and they certainly weren't ready for an open, let alone unhappy ending. One thing I thought was quite a shame in my opinion is how underused a great actor like Vance was in this film. He has very little to work with, maybe a bit when they discover the burglary and well the scene when they talk about the money he gave his wife for her son's therapy is what stays in the mind the most. The only thing that stays in the mind about him. Other than that, he is reduced to stupid liberal race bait comments à la "If he was Black, he'd be in jail right now". I am not saying they should have constructed a story line for this character, but yeah it should have been more than it was eventually. Overall, this is a rocksolid movie with 2 or 3 very good moments, but also with one or two lengths, even if they aren't that serious and certainly no negative deal breakers. But even if the search sequence is intense in the sense if she will find her son alive (after the question if the dog will live),it eventually just turns into a Roberts acting showpiece and lacks a bit on the story-telling site. The best example is how she does not change one word with the guy who found the dog if he saw the son or so. Just no attention shall be taken away from Roberts. And she is good I guess. There is nothing she has not done in other films and there is always a bit of an overacting danger with her, but the character somewhat justifies it here. By the way liked Newton too on a completely unrelated side-note and would have been fine with her having more screen time as I would have been with Vance. So as a whole, this film deserves to be seen, especially if you are a bigger Julia Roberts fan than myself. It is not best of the year material or anything in any department, but worth the 100 minutes. I give it a thumbs-up.

Peter Hedges's "Ben Is Back" is what one might call a Christmas-adjacent movie: it takes place around Christmas but the plot doesn't relate to Christmas. In this case, a woman in a stable family goes home and finds that her son is there after having been in drug treatment. This opens the door to a series of unpleasant events.

Julia Roberts spent much of the 1990s in romantic comedies. This movie is nothing like those. It's got to be one of the grittiest movies of 2018. There were scenes that made me feel as if I was on pins and needles. It's far from the year's greatest movie, but the roughness alone makes it worth seeing.

In the end, the movie's message seems to be that parents must love their children, no matter how low the latter sink. At the very least, they should make an effort to do so. I hope that Hedges keeps turning out movies like this one.

I was thoroughly engaged throughout this film. And I probably should be. I am 32 years old with a mother who died when I was 26 to a heart attack from a drug overdose, and a father that died at the beginning of 2018 from alcoholism and liver failure. I have two brothers who went through drug addiction growing up in their teens through twenties, and my aunts were in Julia Roberts shoes in this movie.

I was even like the sister here - cracking jokes everyone they tried to get clean and not trusting them; getting them into trouble. My aunts, so desperate to get them clean, did anything they could to help. And I mean anything. Thinking that it would be their last time or it would be the time they finally got better.

I am writing this because I read a review saying that Julia Roberts character was unbelievable - her going through this entire journey to find Ben. And I'm here to say that yes it is unbelievable but it's also very much a real thing. I watched it. I watched aunts travel through the streets of Detroit in the dead of winter to find my brothers, i watched them get literally shot at as they grabbed them to take them home. This may seem like some lifetime movie that could never happen - but it does. And it happened to me.

This movie requires people who have never experienced this to accept it as fiction or some stretched reality. But for those of who lived this, it's a reminder of what we've gone through. And to call this unbelievable is probably justified - because it is unbelievable the things family will go through for their loved ones. Unbelievable and impossible are two very different things. The things this mother did is very possible, and very real, albeit unbelievable. Family is unbelievable when it comes to saving the ones they love.

For anyone wondering, my two brothers are both 6/7 years clean and doing much better than we ever thought they could. And yes, I have saved my brothers life before- I watched him cough up black tar as his entire body "locked up" from a reaction and called 911 for them to save his life. And while i laid on the floor next to my mother crying as she laid lifeless, and watched as the doctors shook their head as they couldn't save my father, I still know that there are people that need help and that should get help- and if a movie like this can even one person go the extra set to help someone who needs help - than these movies are worth more than the world.