The Winning Season

A former basketball coach, unemployed and drinking, is offered the job of running a high school girls' team by an old acquaintance. There are six players, nobody expects anything of him, and at first he does not take it seriously either. The film is not interested in a championship. It is interested in the girls taking themselves seriously: it uses the sports-film template without putting victory at the centre, and the coach's broken relationship with his own daughter is the real line of the story. The form is small-scale independent comedy: gyms, buses and kitchens, with dialogue close to improvisation. Jim Strouse wrote and directed; the film screened at Sundance in 2009. Sam Rockwell plays the coach and carries the film almost alone; Emma Roberts is the team's most talented player and Rob Corddry the school administrator. Who it is for: viewers who like Rockwell and low-budget American independents. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a stirring sports movie. The game scenes are short and the film deliberately skips the emotional peaks of the formula.