Sugar

WHEN Anna Boden stepped up to introduce her new movie, “Sugar,” to the opening-night crowd of the Dominican Republic Global Film Festival in November, she felt like a rookie reliever staring down at an All-Star lineup. “It was totally nerve racking,” she said. “I was introducing the film and looking out at these huge stars. Sammy Sosa. Pedro Martinez.

Sports is life writ large, the place where everything -- the triumph, the boredom, the despair -- gets magnified and scrutinized. The best films about sports, and the baseball-themed "Sugar" is surely one, understand that when a character says, "it's just a game, right?" the answer is both yes and no. So though "Sugar" takes place in a setting we haven't seen before, the world of aspiring young players [...] Vai alla recensione »

Step up for this ground-breaking film about race, class, money, sex, isolation, the immigrant experience, lost ideals and — oh, yeah — baseball. On the surface, Sugar sounds pretty rah-rah. Miguel Santos (Algenis Perez Soto), nicknamed Sugar, is a 19-year-old poverty-row Dominican who rides his wicked curveball to a shot at the U.S. big time. Hey, it happened for Sammy Sosa and Pedro Martinez, among [...] Vai alla recensione »

There is something undeniably noble and beautiful about the love of sports: the appreciation of grace and excellence for their own sakes, the pleasure of competition, the discipline of training. But the practice of big-time sports is often cruel and corrupt, a business built on the exploitation of young people and the peddling of impossible dreams. This basic contradiction will be in vivid evidence [...] Vai alla recensione »