Girl, Woman, Other

Jess is a British Punjabi eighteen-year-old in West London who plays soccer better than anyone in her park, and her parents want her to learn to cook a full Indian dinner. She joins a women's team behind their backs, falls for her coach, and has to find a way to be both daughters at once. It's a comedy with a wedding, an ugly sports bra and a lot of heart.

Why it’s here: The film makes a joke out of the fight between family expectations and a girl's ambition, and the girl wins on her own terms. What's punk is that Jess isn't asked to choose between her people and her game. What's pedagogical is how it handles racism, sexism and homophobia in a form a family can watch together. Pairs with Persepolis and Funny Boy.

Four British Muslim men in Sheffield decide to become suicide bombers. Omar is sincere and sharp, Waj is a follower, Barry is a loudmouth convert, and Faisal is trying to train crows to carry explosives. A training trip to Pakistan goes badly wrong, the plan changes shape again and again, and the target ends up being the London Marathon.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the target: Morris takes the most feared subject of the decade and finds the comedy in it, aiming the joke at the ideology and the men chasing it, not at Muslims as a group. After about three years of research with police, terrorism experts and imams, and with British Muslim writers and actors shaping the script, the film sees would-be bombers as sad, bickering, self-important and heartbreakingly human. The pedagogy is in that last part. It shows how a movement offers a lost young man a place and a purpose, how group pressure and ego drive the plan more than belief does, and how the authorities' own blunders belong to the same farce. It treats a suicide bombing as the end of the joke, which is why the ending is hard to watch. Critics split, and some found it a miss, but it makes a useful companion to any serious reading on radicalization.