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

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

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

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

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

If writer-director Paul Morrison's film traces a predictable arc from racial unease to acceptance, it's often winning -- and sometimes tough-minded -- in the details.

Full Review | Oct 31, 2006

Really about the mutual flowering of its characters. That flowering is given full bloom by a uniformly strong cast, but the movie ultimately belongs to Lindo.

| Jul 20, 2006

Pic often works well, with some beautifully observed comic moments ... but there's an unsettling tug between several different movies trying to get out.

| Jul 20, 2006

Ignorance isn't bliss and neither are useless films like this one.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jun 16, 2006

There'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.

| Jan 26, 2006

It's too lightweight to truly succeed as a memorable social drama, but the film's sweet-natured, eager-to-please tone -- backed by Smith's appealing performance -- makes for enjoyable viewing.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 14, 2004

Without the attractive young women and with a game far less exciting to the uninitiated, Oblivion lacks the spark of [Bend It Like Beckham].

Full Review | May 5, 2004

Ultimately, it's an earnest rites-of-passage drama that's likely to work better on the small screen.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 20, 2004