Film Review: Jules is charmingly offbeat - and gentle - sci-fi comedy

Harriet Sansom Harris in Jules.

• Jules
• ★★★★☆
• Cinema release

Jules (12A) stars Ben Kingsley as Milton Robinson, a widower living alone in a small Pennsylvanian town, notorious for being a pedantic grump and growing increasingly forgetful and confused.

So you can imagine the reaction when Milton announces, during a town council meeting, that a spacecraft has crash-landed in his backyard, taking out his azaleas and obliterating his beloved birdbath. 

The trouble is, a spacecraft  has crash-landed in his backyard: ‘I’m not sure what to do,’ says Milton with heart-breaking understatement.

Fobbed off by his loving but busy daughter Denise (Zoe Winters), loner Milton is finally forced to think the unthinkable and reach out to his fellow pensioners, Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris) and Joyce (Jane Curtin), each of whom has her own agenda when it comes to lending a helping hand. 

Written by Gavin Steckler and directed by Marc Turtletaub, Jules is a gentle sci-fi comedy, a kind of ET-meets- Cocoon in which the elderly characters find themselves re-energised by their alien visitor, whom Sandy christens Jules.

That Milton, Sandy and Joyce are all lonely, and focus their attention on Jules in compensation for their estrangement from absent spouses and children, is made clear early on: the humanoid-looking Jules, for his-or-her part, is delightfully impassive, and happy watching TV while the humans bustle around trying to figure out how to keep their new friend safe. Charmingly offbeat.