"A Sunday in Hell" is an up-close and personal documentary, a harrowing look at the French marathon bicycle race that has been held between Paris and Roubaix each year since 1896 -- this film following the 1976 race.
"A Sunday in Hell," so named because that is what the last leg of the race -- a stretch of treacherous cobblestone hills - is called, is a French documentary, but instead of subtitles a British voice-over narration has been dubbed in.
That's fine for much of the film, though there are plenty of unanswered questions that remain when it's over, but for certain segments it becomes rather annoying. Long conversations are held on camera between various players in this real-life drama, but they become merely tedious and tiring to those of us who are not fluent in French.
Still, the racing footage -- particularly when the race reaches "hell" -- is most exhilarating and will have you on the edge of your seat. But the film's full two-hour length could have easily been trimmed if some of the unintelligible conversations had been eliminated.