Charming, bittersweet and surprisingly affecting, Sugar is one of those films that turns out in the final reel to be not the movie you expected, but one that’s far richer and more rewarding.
Algenis Perez Soto stars as Miguel Santos, aka “Sugar,” a young man in the Dominican Republic who dreams of supporting his widowed mother by making it big in American major league baseball. Like many young men on that island nation, it’s an aspiration to which he’s been groomed for most of his short life, and his days are spent at a live-in training facility where he hones his skills and hopes to catch the eye of a talent scout from the U.S.
Frankie is dying, and wants to see his daughter before he goes. Irene, whose heart he broke more than once years ago, is trying to put the past behind her in order to do the right thing by him.
That’s really all that happens in the grassroots drama Barking Water, but it’s far from all that’s going on.
Tres French, tres beautiful and not even a tiny bit believable, Shall We Kiss? is a romantic sitcom with plenty of situation and not all that much romance.
The fact that it’s more a gooey confection than a meditation on the subject of male-female relationships doesn’t mean there’s nothing to enjoy about the film. It’s gently paced, gorgeously photographed, and offers winning performances, beautiful design work and a classical score.
The drama Crossing Over is a great Melting Pot of a movie, populated by characters and stories that seem to have immigrated from everywhere – here a brooding character study, there a soap opera, in this corner a study of social injustice and even, from out of left field, an unexpected murder mystery.
Harrison Ford stars as Max Brogan, an immigration officer who takes flack from his coworkers for caring too much about the illegals he rounds up in the course of his job. Stung by criticism once too often, he turns his back on a young woman (Alice Braga) who’s terrified that her deportation will result in her little boy ending up on the street.
In November 2000, 27 African American citizens of the tiny town of Hearne, Texas were swept up by the local police and tossed into jail on charges of dealing crack. Unable to afford bail, most of them spent months behind bars, eventually giving in to pressure from their court-appointed lawyer to escape prison time by pleading guilty to lesser charges. Now convicted felons, they discovered that they’d signed away most of their rights as American citizens, ruining their own lives at the same moment they’d taken that desperate step to save them.
One woman, young single mother Regina Kelly, refused to play that game. Kelly fought the charges, enlisted the aid of the ACLU, and filed suit against the police and the district attorney who’d been conducting similar raids for years in order to bolster their arrest and conviction statistics.
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