Dark Horse

It's a fable of empowerment, of beating the odds, but Osmond's deft hand ensures it never feels manipulative.

Using video footage, old photos, reenactments and interviews with the spunky local inhabitants, Osmond reconstructs a story of a willful, competitive animal who could and did, and the town that loved her for it.

Director Louise Osmond deftly employs a real-life cast of mostly working-class Welsh men and women describing how a most unlikely horse entered and upended their lives for a spell in a marvelous Cinderella story.

The picture is as textbook an underdog story as anything to have come out of Hollywood, and yet it's the sincerity of the principles who tell the story that make it so uniquely compelling.