Click here to copy URL

Bend It Like Beckham

2002

Gurinder Chadha

Parminder Nagra, Keira Knightley, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Anupam Kher ...

5.7

20,846

Comedy. Romance In west London, 18-year-old Jess Bharma dreams of playing professional football like her idol David Beckham, but her Punjabi Sikh parents have more conventional plans for her: a law degree and marriage. Jules, a blond tomboy, spots Jess playing football in the park and invites her to join the local team. Meanwhile, Jess is forced to help with the preparations for the wedding of her older sister, and is then banned from playing football ... [+]

	Author	Review
United States	Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly	"The most exhilarating movie so far this year. It's made up of many familiar elements yet before long, you catch on to how buoyant and funny and original it is"	POS
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"[It] is good not because it is blindingly original but because it is flawless in executing what is, after all, a dependable formula (...) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Claudia Puig USA Today	"Beckham is a rare amalgam of funny, sweet, action-packed and inspiring (...) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Derek Elley Variety	"Gurinder Chadha assembles a gallery of broadly played stereotypes into a movie about social attitudes that's more rooted in small-screen sitcom than anything deeper"	NEU
United States	Rita Kempley The Washington Post	"You seldom leave a theater walking on air, much less float all through a movie. But the joyous Bend It Like Beckham never lets you down"	POS
United States	Peter Travers Rolling Stone	"Gurinder Chadha juggles all the angles with flair and fairness. Like Nagra and Knightley, the movie is a sweetheart (…) Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Mick LaSalle SFGATE	"Routine, genial sports movie."	NEU
United States	Peter Rainer New York Magazine	"Every generation has to discover the same clichés that were drummed into previous generations, and kids could do worse than to learn them from this film."	POS
United States	A. O. Scott The New York Times	"If Ms. Chadha's direction were as compulsive as the writing, 'Bend It Like Beckham' might have been tighter, funnier and, above all, shorter."	NEU

Return to movie

We encourage you to check the reviews' original sources. Intellectual property rights of these reviews belong to their authors and/or the correspondent media from which they have been extracted. If you'd like to help us to add more reviews to your favorite movies, just send us a message.