For all its bright-hued nostalgia (the cricket greens are practically incandescent), Wondrous Oblivion edges up to hard truths, most powerfully expressed in Lindo's towering performance.
Comment
12/30/06
Wondrous Oblivion (2006)
65
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:40
Fresh:26
Rotten:14
Average Rating:6.2/10
Consensus: This coming-of-age/cricket tale wants to be touching, but is too often sappy.
Theatrical Release:Nov 3, 2006 Limited
Synopsis: Eleven year old David Wiseman is mad about cricket but no good at it. He has all the kit but none of the skill, and he's a laughing stock at school. So when a Jamaican family move in next door and... [More]
Starring: Sam Smith, Delroy Lindo, Stanley Townsend, Emily Woof
Director: Paul Morrison
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Reviews for Wondrous Oblivion
Top CriticAmid the mawkish mess rests a genuinely touching love story between two people who are considered outcasts by mainstream society. Too bad they're not the stars of the movie.
11/03/06
The film feels like the Cliffs Notes version of what might have been a much longer and certainly more satisfying story.
11/03/06
Top CriticWithout the attractive young women and with a game far less exciting to the uninitiated, Oblivion lacks the spark of [Bend It Like Beckham].
05/05/04
Top CriticThe challenges of friendship across color lines.
06/17/07
A small and intimate English film about playing cricket, coming of age, and the respect for diversity that seems so hard to learn.
11/02/06
Form and content fight to the death in Wondrous Oblivion, Paul Morrison's defiantly gauzy tale of racial friction in 1960s England.
11/02/06
Top CriticI didn't know which of Wondrous Oblivion's story threads I should care about so I cared about none.
08/10/06
...floats higher than it should on the wings of star Lindo, the charm of [its child] actors, its odd mix of Jewish and Jamaican culture and the strange sport at its center.
08/05/06
Morrison doesn't seem clear where he's going. He really needs a finely focused resolution to highlight the issues he raises so sharply along the way.
02/13/04
Writer-director Paul Morrison (Solomon & Gaenor) goes for wistful coming-of-age sweetness with this fascinating but slight racial drama.
02/13/04
Ultimately, it's an earnest rites-of-passage drama that's likely to work better on the small screen.
04/20/04
People who aren't fans of cricket or just don't get the rules (i.e. about 99.9% of the U.S. population) might be chronically frustrated.
10/31/06
Pic often works well, with some beautifully observed comic moments ... but there's an unsettling tug between several different movies trying to get out.
07/20/06
Top CriticIt's sweet-as-pie, nicely acted and boasts a marvelous vintage ska-reggae-calypso soundtrack featuring some of the best, bounciest songs of the era, including 'Sugar Dandy,' 'Rudi, A Message to You' and of course, Millie Small's 'My Boy Lollipop.'
11/03/06
Evocative, beautifully photographed and skillfully directed.
03/01/07
Don't worry, knowledge of the game isn't required. Thanks to a wonderful Lindo and an impressive Smith, teacher and pupil are far more intriguing than the game they play.
10/27/06
Ignorance isn't bliss and neither are useless films like this one.
06/16/06
You don't have to know anything about the sport of cricket to be charmed by Wondrous Oblivion, a British film that is finally getting a well-deserved theatrical release after opening the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in 2004.
12/22/06
Top CriticThere's a certain sensitivity -- fine performances, too -- in the subtle handling of the sexual tension between Woof's repressed Jewish spouse and Lindo's handsome stranger. Overall, a safe single when it might have played for the boundary.
01/26/06
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