Bend It Like Beckham

The most exhilarating movie so far this year. It's made up of many familiar elements -- think ''Monsoon Wedding'' meets ''My Beautiful Laundrette'' meets ''Personal Best'' -- yet before long, you catch on to how buoyant and funny and original it is.

Pure, undiluted joy.

As the movie breathlessly cuts back and forth from a boisterous wedding celebration to a high-stakes soccer match, even the grumpy cynics will have been won over.

Like the rest of the film, Beckham's climax is surprisingly satisfying, however, in large part because director Gurinder Chadha films the competing big game and big fat Indian wedding of Nagra's sister with equivalently bursting levels of color, panache, and verve.

An energetic, feel-good blend of comedy, romance and benign drama -- with a side dish of social commentary -- that works despite its strict adherence to the culture clash/generation gap formula.

Its cheery inoffensiveness, though, is in some ways disappointing.

Only silent Becks himself rises unstained from this reheated ethno-niche stew.

This is a pretty decent feel good film about female teenage cultural rebellion, in relation to Jas (Jasminder, played by Parminder Nagra) and I'd also say it has a nice amount of warmhearted defiance present. I liked seeing Keira Knightley in such an early film role. It challenges adults (more specifically, teenage parents) assumptions and it does this pretty well. It is a little dated now, in terms of the fashions and so on but of course thats inevitable, given the film dates from 2002. Its nice to see a pretty mainstream British film which features an Indian teenager as one of the main characters and her wider Indian family as, I suppose, there hadn't previously been a great amount of that seen in most mainstream British films, although I could be wrong but in any case I enjoyed the film and I would recommend it.