Don't listen to the negative reviews

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

I'd never heard of this movie until it showed up on premium cable TV. I'm so glad it did, but wish it had gained the respect and popularity it so deserved. The young men and woman actors captured the despair, fear, and hopefulness of what the young refugees must have experienced perfectly. The one scene in this movie that touched my heart more than any in this, or any other movie, was the one where the orphans are settling into thier new home on the first night. It is just getting dark and you can see the worry on thier faces. I myself have been in a new place/situation many times in my own life. This scene reminded me vividly of what I'd almost forgotten. I remembered being in a new place, lying there as it was just getting dark, and feeling so afraid and longing for people and places I loved. No matter how happy one might be to be in a new place, that fear and longing are such a strong feeling. I thought Reese, though a good actress overall, over-acted a bit in this film. Her dialog AND her delivery, were a bit too trite. Doesn't take away from the movie though. I highly recommend it to everyone.

Sorry not much of a summary, but if you're reading this you'd know the summary anyway. I saw this in a plane coming back home and miraculously saw the end as the plane touched the tarmac! The story also touched my inner self tarmac and I went through a lot of emotions - Trying to associate myself with such a situation was simply futile, just like the dedicated American workers who could just not imagines what these refugees had been through. Imagine isn't even close as similar situations can't be imagined in their reality. Yes we can write about them, have our own feelings and reactions about them. But we can't have the same trauma about them. Like many other situations it needs to be lived, and perhaps it's a good thing as one would not want to have to live all the distressing situations that may affect us. The movie delves into it when it shows characters re-living their ordeal in their thoughts and also the blank or incredulous faces of those who hear about it from the would be 'horses mouth'. I remember a long time ago watching at the cinema Private Ryan. Comfortably seated very close to the screen looking at the beach where I was bombarded with close up of many soldiers 'erased' for ever by machine guns and other weapons.... I guess some are affected by such scenes in a positive and active way but I'm pretty sure the majority of us live the cinema to go on about our own life. "hey it was a good movie, wasn't it". Yes for me I liked this story very much and did not need to know it was inspired by real events...Reality is all around us every day, like my recent trip to Tokyo looking at tarpaulin covering stuff under some bridge, then being told that people were trying to live underneath! I read one of the early comments that recommends to take the youngsters with you to see this movies...Youngsters play games where one shoots 'peoples' with super machine guns, or dismember them with powerful chainsaws and other form of weapons for entertainment! What difference would it make to them. But what difference did it make to me? "life is a lottery" is my deduction.

In the 1980s there was a major civil war in the Sudan causing several children to lose their families. Left on their own devices, these kids had to travel hundreds of miles in order to reach safe haven beyond the border. This film follows the story of one such set of displaced and orphaned children, dubbed by aid workers and media as "The Lost Boys of Sudan". After their eldest brother Theo sacrificed himself to be captured by soldiers, Mamere and his sister Abital were able to reach the refugee camp in Kenya on their own, together with another set of brothers they met along the way, Jeremiah and Paul. Several years later, all four of them, now young adults, were luckily picked to be among those to be relocated to the United States. In Kansas City, Missouri, the boys met employment counselor Carrie Davis, who helped them settle in their new home and find jobs. There, they discovered not only new comforts of life and new opportunities, but also new challenges they had to face. While Mamere worked hard to go to medical school, he constantly worried about his sister Abital who was separated from him at the airport and sent to live in Boston with a foster family. Deeper down, he also continued to be haunted by the sacrifice his brother Theo did for them to live.Reese Witherspoon gets top billing, but she is not the main character of the film at all. Her Carrie goes out of her way to help the Sudanese boys get settled into their new lives. She helps them solve various problems by pulling some bureaucratic strings. But it is still the boys themselves, particularly Mamere, who make the big decisions in their lives. Despite her star status, Witherspoon never drew attention to herself in this role. She gracefully gives her African co-stars the spotlight they deserved.Arnold Oceng plays the lead character Mamere with dignified restraint. It is his performance upon which the whole movie revolved around. He was able to gain our sympathy towards his plight and the various demons he had to face. The actors who played Abital (a radiant Kuoth Wiel), Jeremiah (Ger Duany) and Paul (Emmanuel Jal) all suffered through the Sudanese Civil War in real life, thus accounting for the affecting authenticity in their performances. The young actors who played these characters as child refugees were similarly very effective in their portrayals. Honestly I was not too excited to see this film thinking it would be another one of those "White Savior" films like "The Blind Side" or "Dangerous Minds", where a white man saves a poor person of color out of his miserable condition. At the end though, my fears were unfounded. This turned out to be quite engaging despite its very serious topic. Aside from some awkward moment of humor in the middle as the brothers were adjusting to American life which felt forced, the rest of the film with its theme of brotherly devotion was heartwarming and inspirational. While its overwhelming positivity is wonderful, it may also be seen by some as its main drawback. 7/10.

A lot of stories based on real-life stories don't feel like real life. They feel like a story reborn within a storyteller's imagination to make it somehow more appealing, a better package. Not "The Good Lie." It feels real. And it engenders real emotion. If you can watch this movie and not laugh and feel warm at the heartwarming parts — as we do in real life — and cry at the heartbreaking moments, then you're not watching. You're texting or having a conversation, or thinking about what you're going to do this weekend. If you give yourself over to this film, it will absolutely pull you inside, wrap itself around you and touch your heart. You will laugh. And yes, you will cry. This story puts a very human face on a very human tragedy, that otherwise we might too often look at simply as a headline on an inside page of the newspaper that we pass over to get to something that isn't so hard to fathom.I applaud the people who made this film and thank them. Any filmmaker on the planet would be proud to have been associated with this. I know I would be, and all I am is a guy who stumbled upon it on HBO. What a find.