The Beautiful Game
Thea Sharrock (2024)
I wasn’t expecting a lot but come on …
This feeble sports dramedy (written by Frank Cottrell Boyce) demonstrates that Bill Nighy and Micheal Ward are strong screen presences, which we already knew, and that Ward has soccer as well as acting skills, which we probably didn’t. Hot on the heels of Wicked Little Letters (2023), The Beautiful Game also confirms beyond reasonable doubt that Thea Sharrock is a rotten film-maker. Her latest, now streaming on Netflix, does a good deed in introducing a mass audience to the Homeless World Cup, a tournament that’s been staged annually (except for a three-year Covid interruption) since 2003[1]. But I’m going to let words fail me on this one. Watching an hour or so of the film is enough time to devote to The Beautiful Game.
31 March 2024
[1] https://www.homelessworldcup.org/