Tag: R10
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‘#SeAcabó’ (2024) is a diary of champions
Whether you remember this Netflix documentary as #SeAcabó: Diario de las campeonas or as the English title It’s All Over: The kiss that changed Spanish football, you should remember one thing. These women rose as one above president Luis Rubiales of the Spanish Federation and his underlings. And if you want to see how the…
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Waititi and Fassbender are pitch perfect in ‘Next Goal Wins’ (2023)
In the film industry, remakes surface all the time, even when the story was told pretty well the first time. Someone in Hollywood decides to freshen up the story, try a new perspective, or rewrite the facts completely. So when I read that Director Taika Waititi was going to reconstruct the original 2014 documentary Next…
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A perfect 10 – ‘Lionesses: How Football Came Home’ (2022)
When a football documentary is really great, it makes you root for and admire the players even though they are normally your opponents. As a long time USWNT fan since WWC 1999, I thought I would watch this docu and maybe learn a few things about England’s WNT, also known as the Lionesses. Instead, I…
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A long farewell to ‘Ted Lasso’ Season 3 (2023)
Ted Lasso Season 3 was great and satisfying. All the stories were tidily wrapped up. The dialog was often amazing. Ted’s monologues were inspiration exemplified. The football was better. The writers explored new themes and got knee-deep in immigrant and LGBT issues. But Season 3 of Ted Lasso was a little different for me than…
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‘Super League: The War for Football’ (2023) deserves an Emmy
Having already reviewed Fulwell 73’s feature-length film Super Greed (2022), it took me a long time to get around to watching the 4-episode mini-series Super League: The War for Football. After all, how much more does anyone care to learn about a bunch of billionaires for whom football is strictly business. But Oh, what a…
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‘King Otto’ (2021) wins your heart
What does it mean to be Greek? King Otto shows us through the initial friction between and then a melding of German and Greek cultures on a football pitch. Combining ambitious German discipline with Greek passion and spirit, the result is an improbable underdog run through the 2004 Euros. Like Morocco’s recent run through WC…
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Review: ‘The Gentlemen’s League 2’ (2021)
The USA is not a world power in football, ostensibly because our best athletes play where the money is: football, basketball, and baseball. For years, American fans have lamented, “What if our best athletes played soccer?” In a delightful and amusing series, The Gentlemen’s League provides an answer from South Korea.
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‘Democracia em Preto e Branco’ (2014) politics football and rock ‘n roll
What foments political change? What makes a people realize they deserve a say in how their lives are run? This documentary convinces us the answer is combining politics with football and rock ’n roll.
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‘The 99ers’ (2013) a unique insider view of 1999 USWNT
I almost passed up watching The 99ers on my ESPN+ subscription, because I thought I had already ‘seen it all’ about the 1999 USWNT. But what a mistake if you miss watching this episode of the espnW Nine for IX series. IX in this case refers to Title IX, which required that colleges provide equal funding…
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The bad guys win in ‘Forever Pure’ (2016)
As told to Director Maya Zinshtein, what goes on in a stadium is not just a mirror of society, but indicates the direction society is going. Forever Pure is a uniquely panoptic film of soccer and society. We see that football clubs can be a toy for oligarchs, a tool for politicians, a burning torch…
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The Danish giant-killers of ‘Sommeren ’92’ (2015)
Small country. Wasn’t supposed to be there. Fairytale run. Are we talking about Iceland at Euro 2016? Nope! Before Iceland’s feel-good story, there was a more unbelievable tale. In Sommeren ’92, Writer-Director Kasper Barfoed immortalizes Denmark’s giant-killing performance at the 1992 UEFA European Championship.
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Traveling the world to play pickup ‘Pelada’ (2010)
This documentary follows a pair of collegiate players who, unable to make a pro soccer team, channel their competitive-soccer addiction by traveling the world looking for Pelada — not a drug, but a Brazilian word for pick-up game.
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Soccer fans bind together in ‘La Gran Final’ (2006)
Soccer cannot unite the world. But for a few hours, the motivation to watch a game allows people to set aside their differences. La Gran Final is a triptych of disappearing cultures joining with the modern forces that swallow them, to watch, with ebullient shared enthusiasm, the 2000 World Cup Final of Germany versus Brazil.
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‘Bend It Like Beckham’ (2002) tops soccer movie box office
Bend It Like Beckham proves that when a story is close to the heart, it can make an outstanding soccer movie and family film. At $78M, BILB is probably the top-grossing soccer movie of all time (made for ~$7M).
