This competitive atmosphere of unease moves the film along, but it is full of forebodings that it does not follow through. Something for socially alert, gentle 12-year olds.

| Dec 15, 2017

The challenges of friendship across color lines.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 17, 2007

Evocative, beautifully photographed and skillfully directed.

| Mar 1, 2007

David's favorite exclamation is "wondrous!" %u2014 which happens to be a fitting description for the talents of writer/director Paul Morrison.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 1, 2007

Wondrous Oblivion is a timeless tale of an 11-year-old South London boy putting aside boyish things. Writer-director Paul Morrison affirms PG-rated life lessons that could appeal to 11-year-olds and their elders alike.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 12, 2007

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.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Dec 30, 2006

A touching rite-of-passage flick which simultaneously sends several valuable messages about friendship, fidelity, tolerance, and reaching for the stars.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 28, 2006

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.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 22, 2006

...Thanks to solid performances and very nice cinematography, it hits, if not a home run, at least a solid double (or the British equivalent).

| Dec 15, 2006

A family film with a difference, Wondrous Oblivion displays real bite as it incisively tackles such adult subjects as racism, anti-Semitism, adultery and the plight of immigrants in an intolerant land.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 23, 2006

Amid 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.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 3, 2006

It'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.'

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 3, 2006

The film feels like the Cliffs Notes version of what might have been a much longer and certainly more satisfying story.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 3, 2006

It loses direction, turning contrived and sentimental.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 3, 2006

Good intentions and some nicely playful moments go a long way toward balancing out Paul Morrison's uneven story of British immigrants in the early 1960s.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 3, 2006

Form and content fight to the death in Wondrous Oblivion, Paul Morrison's defiantly gauzy tale of racial friction in 1960s England.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 2, 2006

A small and intimate English film about playing cricket, coming of age, and the respect for diversity that seems so hard to learn.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 2, 2006

Lindo gives a powerhouse performance of immense feeling and subtlety.

| Original Score: B | Nov 2, 2006

[The film] strikes a curiously cheerful note in these singularly cheerless times.

Full Review | Nov 1, 2006

Wondrous Oblivion goes awry in its sloppy racial drama, and although the cricket-training montages are good, they're still training montages, and this is just that kind of overfamiliar movie.

| Original Score: C+ | Nov 1, 2006