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100This one slice of the American experience amounts to one of the best films of the year.
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100A baseball movie, a stranger-in-a-strange-land movie, a movie about real people facing real challenges in the real world, Sugar is all that and more.
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100Sugar is that sweetest of films: A sensitive and memorable story that surprises at every turn.
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100In its unhurried fashion, Sugar can take its place with the best baseball movies. Where most focus on the grand slam, this one's about the life that surrounds the game and everything that comes after.
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100It is both sad and hopeful, but the film's sorrow and its optimism arise from its rarest and most thrilling quality, which is its deep and humane honesty.
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100A film of rare intelligence, beauty and compassion.
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100As the film plays out its melancholy story, we realize that what we are watching is far rarer than the usual sports flick.
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90A moving, surprising and provocative baseball flick that rises immediately to No. 1 with a bullet on my personal list.
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88The result is raw and riveting.
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88Algenis Perez Soto plays the character so openly, so naturally, that an interesting thing happens: Baseball is only the backdrop, not the subject. This is a wonderful film.
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88Sugar is a near-great movie with qualities more unusual than some all-time classics. It resists cliche at every turn and puts something solid in its place: raw yet controlled observation that gives the film the form of a flexing muscle.
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83The film's style is so ''objective'' it's a bit subdued, yet this is a sports drama of total originality, as well as the most authentic inside view of the immigrant experience the movies have given us in quite a while.
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83There's quality, wit and emotion throughout.
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83Instead of hitting all the usual beats, Sugar just moseys in a mostly delightful way.
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80The filmmakers have mostly cast from Dominican playing fields rather than from acting studios -- Algenis Perez Soto, the accomplished first-time performer who plays Miguel Sugar Santos, was himself a teen ballplayer -- so game and practice sequences have an easy authenticity from the start.
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80Without a trace of didacticism, Boden and Fleck portray the insidious details of exploitation and hollow American maxims.
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80As good as it is because of the care and skill writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck bring to it, gifts that were visible in their first film, "Half Nelson," which earned a lead actor Oscar nomination for Ryan Gosling.
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80The most remarkable thing Sugar does is give American viewers a sense of how our country must seem to a newly arrived immigrant, without caricaturing or condescending to either guest or host.
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80Sympathetic, genial and exceedingly wholesome, it's a film that, once seen, will permanently and favorably influence the way viewers regard the characters' real-life counterparts.
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80This is a drama of shifting values and compromised ideals, arriving at a view of life that's wise, complicated, and tinged with melancholy.
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75A gripping look at the immigrant experience, with small moments as important - and visually arresting - as any on the baseball diamond.
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75Mainly, though, the film's strength is reportorial, sensitively exploring a theme that has grown ever more prominent with the globalization of sport.
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70The price of the production's integrity is a leisurely pace -- but it's a worthwhile one. Though Sugar demands patience, it deserves attention.
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60A thoughtful drama about guys who have a moment in the big time before returning home to an odd reflected glory.
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50Algenis Perez Soto was a baseball player in real life, which helps to explain his sensitive, understated performance as Sugar. But he's let down by a manipulative script recycled from dozens of sports and immigrant movies. At least it dispenses with a Hollywood ending.
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50Sugar is a curiosity – too somber for a picaresque, too arm's-length for much emotional effect – and while it's interesting, it's never truly absorbing.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 6 out of 6
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Mixed: 0 out of 6
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RyanD9
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paigeg9Brilliant film, engaging and beautifully filmed. Also worth seeing though so the doc Road to the Big Leagues as it is the real story!
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MarkP10