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For their 247th episode, two fearful film critics, two mind-reading dads, and two web-slinging school teachers, Will Johnson and Don Shanahan, had a new conversation spin away from the usual format. What started as a chat on the runaway sensation Spider-Man: Brand New Day became an advance therapy session for the state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Avengers: Doomsday looming this December. For years, this show's mantra has been "Trust Kevin Feige." That might not be the case at the moment. Come learn more and stay for the mutual love and respect that fun movies encapsulate. Enjoy our podcast!
Cinephile Hissy Fit is an Astra Award-losing Film Obsessive media podcast, brought to you by the Ruminations Radio Network, and a member of the Critics Choice Podcast Network. Please visit, rate, review and subscribe. If you enjoyed this show, we have more where that came from, with interesting hosts, and wonderful guests. All are available on iTunes, Spotify, and anywhere you find your favorite shows. Follow the show on Twitter at @CinephileFit and on Facebook. Also, find both Will Johnson and Don Shanahan on Letterboxd as they accumulate their viewings and build their ranks and lists. Lastly, check out their TeePublic store for merchandise options from stickers to t-shirts!
Thank you so much for your captive audience and social media participation! Enjoy our new podcast episode!
For decades, gambling films have been associated with glamorous casinos, expensive suits and dramatic confrontations across card tables. Yet some of the genre’s most compelling stories take place far from the polished surroundings of Las Vegas, focusing instead on damaged characters, desperate decisions and the psychological consequences of chasing an unlikely victory. Streaming has created […]
Sweet Bonanza, launched by Pragmatic Play on June 25, 2019, is a cascade-style video slot game with a fruit and candy theme. Since its introduction, Sweet Bonanza has evolved into a series, but this review focuses on the original 2019 release.
Sweet Bonanza at a Glance
Feature
Details
Provider
Pragmatic Play
Release Date
25/06/2019
Grid
6×5
RTP
96.48% (reported; may vary by configuration)
Volatility
High
Win Mechanic
8+ matching symbols anywhere on the grid
Free Spins Trigger
4+ Scatter symbols
Initial Free Spins
10
Maximum Bomb Multiplier
100×
Maximum Win
21,175×
Sweet Bonanza Gameplay
6×5 Grid
Sweet Bonanza's gameplay takes place within a 6×5 grid of colourful symbols, laying out a candy-loaded screen. The candies, fruits, and lollipop symbols are the result of crisp and colourful art design.
How Winning Combinations Work
Winning combinations are formed by matching 8, 9, 10, 11, or 12 or more of the same symbol. This means that you must collect enough matching symbols to form a win. A winning combination doesn't need to follow a horizontal or diagonal payline, as is traditional in slot games. Instead, you need to land at least 8 of the same fruit or candy symbols (eight is the minimum), regardless of their position on the grid.
Sweet Bonanza will pay the highest symbol payout tier if you land 12 or more of the same symbol. So, if you land 12 of the same fruit, you'll generally win a smaller prize than if you land 12 red heart candies. Two slots can look almost identical and still pay very differently for the same number of matching symbols. That’s worth remembering when comparing games on Casina Portal — the paytable tells you far more than the graphics.
Tumble Feature
After a winning combo, the winning symbols disappear and the reels tumble to give you the chance to land a new or bigger win. This makes each paid spin capable of producing several consecutive payouts. New icons appear on the screen and subsequent wins are awarded as they occur.
Sweet Bonanza Symbols and Payout System
Fruit Symbols
The five fruit symbols, banana, grapes, watermelon, plum, and apple, are among the lowest-paying. You need 8 of the same fruit to win a prize, and wins go up progressively for 10, 11, and 12 or more matching fruits.
Candy Symbols
Typically, the higher payouts come from the candy icons. There are 4 different coloured candies, each one offering different prize values. The red heart candy is the highest-paying, with wins of 10× for 8 or 9 hearts becoming 50× if you land 12 or more.
Lollipop Scatter
The lollipop is a special Scatter symbol that can also award a payout. When 4 or more lollipops land on the grid, you'll trigger a Free Spins bonus, with the Scatter payout increasing when additional lollipops land.
Multiplier Bombs
Multiplier Bombs can award multipliers ranging from 2× to 100×. You can accumulate these multipliers during the same tumble sequence, so it's possible to combine several bombs into a much larger multiplier.
Sweet Bonanza Free Spins
How to Trigger Free Spins
The Free Spins feature is triggered when four or more Scatter symbols land.
Number of Free Spins
Sweet Bonanza launches the bonus with 10 Free Spins — whether you enter the bonus with four, five, or six lollipops. You get a higher Scatter payout for additional lollipops on the triggering spin: five lollipops give you 5× your bet, six lollipops give you 100× your bet, while four lollipops award 3× your bet, with 10 Free Spins granted in each case.
Retriggering the Feature
The number of times you can retrigger Free Spins is not fixed at 100, and five additional free spins are awarded whenever at least three lollipop Scatters land during the bonus.
Multiplier Bombs During Free Spins
If a multiplier bomb lands during the bonus round, the player can receive a multiplier of up to 100× on a winning tumble. If there are multiple multiplier bombs, their values are combined together and applied to the total tumble win.
Sweet Bonanza Tumble Feature
The Tumble feature is at the core of Sweet Bonanza. Winning matches disappear from the grid, but non-winning symbols remain. New symbols then cascade down to fill the gaps, allowing for more wins from a single paid spin. The feature continues until no new winning combination appears.
Sweet Bonanza isn't the only slot where one spin can lead to several wins. Spilloversikt.com also explains how cascading reels work in Megaways games, where the number of ways to win changes from spin to spin.
With cascading wins, each spin may give you several payouts. If the Tumble feature produces another winning combination, you'll see a new payout before the next tumble, allowing the sequence to continue without an additional wager.
Understanding Sweet Bonanza's RTP
Standard RTP
Sweet Bonanza's commonly reported RTP is 96.48%, which falls within the typical range for modern online slots, although individual game configurations may differ.
Sweet Bonanza has a notable feature in its bonus round: the random multiplier bombs. These randomly awarded multipliers are included in the RTP calculations, and they're available only during Free Spins.
What RTP Does and Does Not Mean
Return to Player (RTP) specifies the theoretical expected return from the game to the player, expressed as a percentage. In other words, the RTP corresponds to how much of the money wagered on a slot machine is returned to players over the long term.
This percentage is a theoretical one calculated over a large number of spins using the game's mathematical model rather than a player strategy. So, while the RTP figure represents an expected average return across a massive number of spins, it doesn't specifically apply to a smaller number. It doesn't serve as a prediction for a player's outcome after 100, 1,000, or 10,000 spins.
Sweet Bonanza Volatility
During its launch in 2019, Pragmatic Play classified Sweet Bonanza as a high-volatility game. While substantial payouts may be less frequent, their potential size can be relatively large.
What Does a High Volatility Slot Machine Mean?
In a high-volatility slot game, larger payouts generally occur less frequently, meaning players may experience longer periods without a substantial win. A low-volatility slot game, in contrast, has more frequent, but generally smaller payouts.
Sweet Bonanza Maximum Win
Sweet Bonanza offers a maximum return of up to 21,175× your stake. This should not be confused with wins announced for later versions like Sweet Bonanza 1000 and Sweet Bonanza 2500.
Sweet Bonanza Bonus Features
Free Spins and 100× Multiplier Potential
After triggering 10 Free Spins in the bonus round, each bomb can boost your win by up to 100×, and the combined multiplier means you could substantially increase your winnings.
Extra Free Spins and Tumbles During the Bonus
Keep in mind that landing 3 or more Scatter symbols during Sweet Bonanza Free Spins will award five additional spins. The number of extra spins depends on the lollipops that land during the Free Spins feature, rather than any strategy the player can control.
Sweet Bonanza Design and Theme
The game's vibrant visual style is meant to evoke a playful, colourful aesthetic. Colors and graphics are bright and expressive, creating a lively atmosphere. The sound effects are energetic, helping to give the reels a distinctive rhythm. However, the game's overall style and aesthetic are simple, with no narrative or backstory involved.
Sweet Bonanza vs Sweet Bonanza 1000
Feature
Sweet Bonanza
Sweet Bonanza 1000
Release
2019
2024
Grid
6×5
6×5
Multiplier ceiling
Up to 100×
Up to 1,000×
Maximum win
Up to 21,175× the original bet
Up to 25,000× the original bet
Pragmatic Play described the 1,000× multiplier in Sweet Bonanza 1000 as 10 times the original game's multiplier.
Sweet Bonanza vs Sweet Bonanza 2500
The latest addition to the series, Sweet Bonanza 2500, was released on April 30, 2026. It introduced two key changes:
The multiplier ceiling increased to 2,500×, up from 1,000× in Sweet Bonanza 1000.
The maximum advertised win reached 25,000× the original bet, up from 21,175× in the original game.
The organisers of the Iris Prize LGBTQ+ Film Festival – celebrating global stories and Cardiff charm are proud to announce that director LuÃs Hindman has won the prestigious Iris Prize supported by The Michael Bishop Foundation for his film Magid / Zafar. The announcement was made this morning (18 October) at the BBC Cymru Wales […]
Playing at this year’s London Film Festival, as well as closing out the 20th anniversary edition of Cardiff’s Iris Prize. Black Church Bay is a tense drama set in a small Welsh village, centred on school teacher Barry (Tom Cullen), who is leading a double life. When an intimate encounter with a younger man, Jasper […]
The organisers of the Iris Prize LGBTQ+ Film Festival – celebrating global stories and Cardiff charm are thrilled to announce that the winner of the Iris Prize Best British Short Film Award sponsored by Film4 and Pinewood Studios is Darius Shu, for Molly. Darius produced Queer Parivaar, which won Best British Short at Iris Prize 2022 […]
After an opening montage of news clips set to the overused one-hit wonder needle drop of “Spirit in the Sky” by Norman Greenbaum blends the highs and lows of dancing Presidents, destructive protests, and random messianic imagery, The Plea commences to genuflect in the direction of Sidney Lumet. Bathed in soft black-and-white cinematography by DP Tinx Chan (Starring Jerry as Himself), twelve jurors assemble in a room, scrolling through their phones, pacing idly, and venting frustrations before the devices are collected. They’ve all met, but this is their first chance to deliberate or, better yet, argue, and it starts almost immediately. Their names are their juror numbers rather than what’s written on their IDs.
Even so, the stereotypes and archetypes arrive in a hurry, dominated initially by the quarrelsome middle-aged Juror #1, played by The Plea’s co-director and co-writer Dean Imperial (TV’s Godfather of Harlem). He’s your classic “it’s a free country” asshole who’s already stirring shit and rubbing people the wrong way. Once the bailiff (steady TV actress April Matthis) arrives with shouted calls to simmer down and focus on the judge’s order that this case before them be decided unanimously and according to the law, you wonder how this cornucopia of banalities is ever going to agree anytime soon.
As that uncomfortable and daunting feeling creeps into place,a sizable truth about this film and the jury-centric movies its following becomes clear when the doors are locked. There’s a two-headed monster for these types of proceedings: figuring out the case or figuring out the people voting on the ruling. The Plea, as it presents its path of scenes, tips its hand as to its preferred answer to that proverbial question.
LESSON #1: THE PARTICULARS OF THE CASE AT HAND— Start with The Plea’s case. An unseen defendant, an IVF technician at a fertility clinic, is being tried for twelve counts of murder for spilling a tray of a dozen fertilized embryos that ceased to be viable. Even if the jury considers this act an accident, manslaughter charges are still possible. At the heart of the case is the interpretation of the embryos, technically called EUPs (extra-uterine persons), and the legal definition of “personhood.” The voting divide among the sequestered greatly mirrors the contentious gulf between conservative pro-life defenders and those more staunchly pro-choice.
LESSON #2: FIGURING OUT THE PEOPLE— Because of the temperature of those topics, The Plea leans on figuring out the people. The most vocal not-guilty/non-personhood proponent is Juror #7 (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy of Passing), a pushy woman willing to stand, shout, and curse to show her dominance on this issue. Her common opponent is her neighboring Juror #8 (Stir of Echoes star Kathryn Erbe), an older, calm woman who sums up all decisions as “God’s will.” Caught in the middle is everyone else—including the sullen widower, Juror #12 (Dennis Boutsikaris of *batteries not included and Better Call Saul), the panic-attack-prone Juror #5 (Trieu Tran of Altered Carbon), the deaf young lady, Juror #6 (Millicent Simmonds of the A Quiet Place series, this movie’s biggest casting get), and the movie star within their midst, Juror #2 (Outer Banks’s Jason Alan Carvell)---and the gay jury foreman, Juror #10, played by the other co-director/co-writer and editor Zach LeBeau, trying in vain to keep the peace. Curiously, to a degree, yet matching Lesson #2’s course of action, more than half of The Plea follows these people outside of the deliberation room.
Coyly paired in hotel rooms (like the ardent Christian with the incensed Gen-Z atheist and the gay guy with the misogynist) and allowed to congregate at the baobab tree that is the hotel bar manned by the lone bartender (The Wire’s Gbenga Akinnagbe) after each complete day, the ensemble lets their characters’ hair down in these unlocked moments. The assigned quota of liquid courage bends moral judgments, ignites more politics, blurs boundaries, and closes generation gaps in a host of interesting and telling conversations and encounters that become the pinnacle moments of the collected performances. This large group of actors is given wonderful latitude to extract unique depth from their assigned tropes and lanes. Two headturners from this downtime are the aggressive flirts of Juror #2 (Danny DeFerrari of Oppenheimer) and Juror #9 (Starlit Diner’s Carolina Gutierrez), who also hold the position as The Plea’s second loudest and meanest of their gender in the room, after Juror #1 and Juror #7.
Without a doubt, this hypothetical premise in The Plea is a fascinating clash of ideals, even before considering the particular people weighing the verdict. The pendulum swaying between the debate of what constitutes being alive is as precarious as the wavering strength of sacredness towards jury duty itself, and all the buzzwords, labels, and derogatory terms are lashed. Their first vote is 7 to 5 in favor of guilty/personhood, showing they have a long way to go. Add in the chasm represented by wildly different measures of reasonable doubt, and The Plea can press more hot-button talking points than Buddy the Elf hitting floor numbers in an Empire State Building elevator.
The Plea labels itself as a “comedy noir” within the courtroom subgenre, though, other than a few witty retorts and comeback burns, there are very few laughs. Sure, the bailiff comes in loud, and the scope of this fictional case is grandiose, which can create rub-your-nose-in-it satire between the altruistic and the merciful. However, other than one character briefly acknowledging the unshown media circus out the window, Zach LeBeau, Dean Imperial, and the third contributing writer, Scott Organ (What Comes Around), keep everything on the tremors of group dynamics rumbling one step further than the usual behind-the-scenes setting of a jury room. There’s shrewd wisdom in that call, because, like this film’s second lesson, that’s plenty and that’s where the real intrigue is. While the overarching rhetoric is scintillating and probably deserves more time in actual deliberations, The Plea found the right territory to explore in this all-hands-on-deck indie standout.
