Damned United A boyish, reckless man facing professional ruin, with his young sons waiting in the car a few feet away, drops to his knees in front of a heavyset, dumpy-looking fella who, moments before, had been pruning flowers. As depicted in Peter Morgan's witty screenplay, the younger man, Brian Clough (Michael Sheen), is begging his one-time assistant, Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall), to recreate the dynamic duo that had revolutionized British football during the late 1960s and early 70s. "I apologize unreservedly for being a twat! Unreservedly! Please, please, baby, take me back!"

Clough, a master media manipulator, had taken a football non-entity, Derby County, to a first-division championship, only to lose his balance because of his professional envy of another coach, Don Revie (Colm Meany), whose Leeds United squad won by a cynical, aggressive brand of football bordering on dirty. Based on a bestselling UK novel by David Peace, Damned United is one of three films this year (with An Education and Pirate Radio) that show how postwar Britons learned to adapt to a diminished world profile – but more importantly, learned to have fun as a culture.

Helmed by Tom Hooper (fresh off his success with the John Adams TV series), Damned United features Michael Sheen doing his patented cheeky defiance of the establishment. In a scene that reveals the thin line walked when straight guys bond, Meany's Don Revie taunts Sheen's Clough with a saucy question about why Clough hadn't been able to establish a relationship with his old Leeds team: "Didn'

Scene from Good Hair.

With just a snippet of hot, sweaty male bodies, Damned United gets inside the modern sports bubble of money, ego and testosterone to give even the decided non-fan a good time.

Good Hair Catching Chris Rock's hilarious excursion through the far-flung business empire dedicated to keeping African American women happy with the hair on their heads, even and especially if it did not grow there in the first place, I reflected on the importance of hair, particularly the kinky, split-ends sort of Jewish-Afro hair that I somehow inherited through my British/French/Dutch gene pool. In my Beatlemania period, I used to slap my unruly Fro down with a wooden brush. Later, I would proudly waltz down a Brooklyn boulevard after my first perm, my new style bouncing on top of my head, my first badge of queer identity.

In Good Hair, the super-smooth Rock demonstrates how peculiar the role is that hair and hair products play in allowing affluent African American women to find their groove in the Obama era. Rock takes us to black hair central: Atlanta, Georgia, to a black hair products fair where an annual hairstyling "battle of the bands" features a flamboyantly queer hair designer. Rock chats up Jason Griggens, a blonde and fit 30something hair-stylist called "the Betty Ford of black hair." Jason wins top hair-stylist in a judged competition that is the American Idol of black hair care. To preserve his baby-soft complexion, Jason submits to a Botox injection in the cheeks. "I don't feel as beautiful as I anticipated. I feel like I've been attacked by killer bees!"

While awaiting Jason's face-off against three black challengers, Rock takes us on a whirlwind tour of the African American hair-care business, where two products rule: hair-relaxer, the deadly sodium peroxide or "creamy crack" that allows many black women to flaunt silky smooth, straight hair; and hair weaves: many black women wear hair extensions, human hair from India. In one of the great comic spins from globalization, human hair is one of India's biggest cash crops: since hair is thought a vanity by many Indians, about 10 million adults donate their hair to secure God's blessing. That hair is processed and transported by a Byzantine network of Indian and Korean businessman to black beauty centers, where it fetches big bucks by the pound.

Rock walks a fine line gently tweaking the absurdities of the black hair business, where 10% of the population uses up to 80% of the nation's hair products. He tracks the sexual/sociological fallout: black women who don't want anybody touching their pricey weaves, including the husbands/boyfriends who foot the tab. We hear from women who log thousands of miles, sit hours in a stylist's chair and pay up to $18,000 annually to maintain their hair habit.

At the end of a humane, funny if perplexing hair tour, a young woman confesses to the irony that in "post-racial America," a young black woman applying for a high-status job probably won't be taken seriously if her hair is in its natural state. (Now playing.)