By John Corrado

Last week, 20th Century Fox released the recent sequel The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel on Blu-ray.  With the highly opinionated Muriel Donnelly (Maggie Smith) acting as his advisor, overeager manager Sonny Kapoor (Dev Patel) is trying to juggle the purchase of a new property to expand the hotel with preparations for his upcoming marriage, while also feeling compelled to put on a good show for new guest Guy Chambers (Richard Gere).

Although the 2012 surprise hit didn’t seem to be a likely candidate for a sequel, other than for financial reasons, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is still an entertaining chance to spend time with these delightful characters.  Yes, the plot is looser this time, and the story doesn’t have the same emotional weight as the first, but the film itself is often as pleasant as a night spent in the company of old friends.

With expectedly solid work from returning favourites like Maggie Smith, Judi Dench and Bill Nighy, the performances and cast are once again uniformly excellent, and The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is an enjoyable sequel that’s worth seeing for the abundance of nicely written exchanges and wonderful moments of interplay between them, all well staged by returning director John Madden.

The Blu-ray also includes six featurettes and a gallery of images.

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is 123 minutes and rated PG.