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GREAT BRITAIN

Bend It Like Beckham- Gurinder Chadha
Bend It Like Beckham is a stylish, warmhearted comedy about overcoming cultural differences while celebrating them. Jess (Parminder K. Nagra) is a tomboyish London-area teen whose tradition-minded family hates the idea of girls playing soccer. They want her to be focused on preparing for her upcoming marriage and life as a wife. But Jess loves the game, idolizes Manchester United soccer legend David Beckham, and plays in pickup soccer games, on the sly, whenever she can. One day she is spotted by Jules (Keira Knightly) and is invited to try out for the Hounslow Harriers, a girl's league team. There is only one choice, but the complications of a double life are about to become more real. Chadha convincingly captures the speed, skill and indomitable spirit of women's amateur soccer while fashioning a heroine whose struggle for independence will make you root, soccer fan or not. (112 mins.)
Print courtesy of Fox Searchlight Films.
Filmography: Bhaji on the Beach (93),
What's Cooking? (00).
Showtimes: 2/21, 7pm BW and 2/23, 4:45pm GU.

Morvern Callar- Lynne Ramsay
Following up on her acclaimed debut, Ratcatcher, Scottish director Lynn Ramsay has adapted Alan Warner's cult novel into a mesmerizing, darkly comic portrait of a disconnected young woman's search for her own identity. Morvern, a supermarket-shelf stocker in a small town, wakes up on Christmas Day to find that her writer- boyfriend has committed suicide in the kitchen. Already out of touch with the world, Morvern drifts further into her own mind, until the chance discovery of his un-submitted novel on his computer leads her to sign her name to the work, empty his bank account and head out for a Spanish coastal resort for whatever comes. "An elegy for the rave generation, its hallucinatory visuals are echoed by the trippy textures of its soundtrack (with tracks by Aphex Twin, Can, Lee Hazelwood and Broadcast) and the wayward drift of its narrative. Euphoric, strange and unforgettable, this cinema at its most audacious and compelling: a triumphant return for one of the most gifted filmmakers of her generation."-Edinburgh Film Festival. New Director Prize, Cannes Film Festival. (97 mins.) Print courtesy of Cowboy Releasing.
Featured Filmography: Ratcatcher (99).
Showtime: 2/21, 7pm GU.

Sweet Sixteen- Ken Loach
"Returning to territory he knows well, Ken Loach is in exceptional form with Sweet Sixteen, a slice of Glasgow working-class social realism in a tough Glasgow district, sensitively rendered by the director's peerless capacity to combine humor and compassion with honesty and despair. The film centers on an adolescent boy who's sucked into a bleak spiral of crime and hopelessness. The superbly modulated drama steadily increases its heart-wrenching quality via quiet, unmanipulative means, building into an entirely believable story of bitter disappointment, thanks to Paul Laverty's economical script and ear for dialogue, combined with Loach's direct style, intimate grasp of the characters and faultless handling of key conflicts and confrontations. A rich vein of humor (often deriving from colorful local vernacular), the tenderness in scenes with mother and son, and the sad reality of the boy's narrow options, give Sweet Sixteen a quiet emotional pull and a resoundingly melancholy, affecting resolution."-Variety. (106 mins.) Print courtesy of Lions Gate Films.
Selected Filmography: Kes (70), Looks and Smiles (81), Riff Raff (91), Land and Freedom (95), Carla's Song (96), Bread and Roses (00), The Navigators (01).
Showtimes: 2/27, 6pm GU and 3/1, 7pm BW.

Is Not A Love Song- Bille Eltringham
Spike and Heaton, two petty criminals, are an unlikely pair: two loners who have fatefully found each other. Taciturn, competent, unreadable, Heaton is someone we are instinctively afraid of. In contrast, sidekick Spike is manic and childlike: someone we are instinctively afraid for. But when Spike accidentally commits a terrible crime, Heaton stands by him-an act of astonishing, and foolhardy, loyalty. The two flee across
a vast landscape of Scottish moors, rivers and forests, the exhausted fugitives hunted, not by the police, but by a chilling posse of farmers relentlessly bent on revenge. When Heaton injures his leg, the roles are reversed-suddenly it is Heaton who needs Spike's loyalty. "While digital video often is employed by filmmakers to no real aesthetic end beyond its speed, technical simplicity and reduced cost, Eltringham harnesses its creative possibilities, along with a variety of experimental techniques, to bring emotional edge, tension and visual texture to a fugitive thriller that could have been standard genre fare. This tale of a criminal duo becomes steadily more interesting as it develops into an understated yet soulful doomed love story."-David Rooney, Variety. (92 mins.) Print courtesy of Wellspring Media.
Filmography: Yellow (96), The Darkest Light (99).
Showtimes: 2/22, 4:45pm WH and 2/24, 8:15pm BW.

PHOTO-SWEET SIXTEEN