As AC recently pointed out, there are no "baseball movies." Baseball movies just use the national pastime as the mileu for a story about "coming of age" or "learning about love" or "making peace with your asshole father" or whatever.

So there's another baseball film playing right now at the Harvard Exit. But Sugar falls into an unusual camp as an art-house/Sundance-style immigration film. The characters are subtle. The plot doesn't go all crazy Hollywood on you. Everything is believable, occasionally touching, occasionally funny, ultimately human. The moments that make you tear up aren't shots of Sugar finally making the big club... but rather when a waitress takes an extra minute to teach Sugar how to order eggs rather than brushing him off as someone that "needs to learn how to speak proper English."

The biggest criticism I've heard is that the film-makers heavy-handedly chose the name Sugar to evoke the idea that baseball players are the new island crop in our exploitative triangle trade system (as sugar cane used to be.) They may have, but the film actually seems pretty even-handed to me. It does not present the US in a uniformly bad light. Here's the best review I found in a brief search.

I'm curious what other people thought of it, or if they are willing to go see it as baseball fans. When I was leaving the theater I said, "That was almost an anti-baseball movie." But after thinking about it for a day, and after reading some reviews... I agreed with something I read: "It was really just an anti-Sammy Sosa movie."

I didn't love it, but I did think it had quite a bit of integrity and I didn't immediately forget it once I had left the theater.