Sugar

The fictional tale of Miguel 'Sugar' Santos, a talented young baseball pitcher from the Dominican Republic who moves to Iowa to play in a minor league in a bid to take his family out of poverty. Once in the US, however, he begins to question his ambitions.

David Jenkins, Time Out: In Sugar, the pair [writer-director duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck] skilfully dismantle the timeworn themes, characters and story patterns of the conventional sports movie and then reassemble them as a rich, socially astute realist drama about commerce, estrangement and communication in the US. (Verdict: four stars out of five)

Nigel Andrews, Financial Times: Sugar is dazzlingly free of message creep. We are perplexed, yet fully persuaded, every time that Miguel (played with miraculous transparency by Algenis Perez Soto) is raised up by self-belief before a roaring crowd or cast down by self-doubt, and every time an honest emotion – his pride in his pitching prowess, his attraction to the daughter of the Iowa Quakers he rooms with – is dashed on the rocks of the (to him) specious or inauthentic, whether the girl's recruiting work for God or the team's for American Dream hoop-la. (Verdict: four stars out of five) ·