- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
100Like a cold beer under a bluebird sky; like a flawless line drive on a warm summer's day; like a long, languorous seventh-inning stretch - Moneyball satisfies.
-
100Never before, though, have statistics added up to such electrifying entertainment. After the mostly minor-league productions of recent months, this movie, which was directed by Bennett Miller, renews your belief in the power of movies.
-
100It's hard to imagine anyone but Mr. Pitt in the role. He's relaxed yet edgy and sometimes unsettling.
-
100Funny, furious, and full of front-office drama.
-
100Moneyball is the perfect sports movie for these cash-strapped times of efficiency maximization.
-
100The real protagonist of Moneyball, however, is Beane himself, played with great charisma by Brad Pitt. (With this movie and "The Tree of Life" competing against each other, Pitt could wind up cheating himself out of an Oscar this year.)
-
100The movie is an absolute triumph of culturally relevant filmmaking – a film that will thrill and fascinate sport junkies and non-fans alike. If you like baseball, you will love this movie. If you hate baseball, you will still love this movie.
-
100A smart, intense and moving film that isn't so much about sports as about the war between intuition and statistics. I walked in knowing what the movie was about, but unprepared for its intelligence and depth.
-
Sep 9, 2011100While a hopelessly awkward-looking Hill provides fish-out-of-water laughs, Pitt gives a genuinely soul-searching performance.
-
91The supersmart and rousing Moneyball, which may be the best baseball movie since "Bull Durham," is also about talk, but in a coolly heady and original inside-the-front-office way.
-
90Starring Brad Pitt in top movie star form, it's a film that's impressive and surprising.
-
90His performance is a canny portrait of leadership - part genius, part crazy guts, part dumb luck - and worthy of moving Pitt up to the playoff round of Oscar finalists for Best Actor. We'd put money on it.
-
90Now that Pitt no longer has brash youth on his side, he's digging deeper and doing more with less. It's the kind of acting - understated but woven with golden threads of movie-star style - that gives us more to look at rather than less.
-
90It really happened, it's really corny, and it's really great.
-
90The surprisingly effective Moneyball has a smart script, solid direction and great performances.
-
88A crowd-pleasing baseball movie for people - like me - who don't like baseball movies...Probably the finest baseball movie since "Bull Durham".
-
88The supporting cast is strong, as is the deft, sharply witty script. Miller directs elegantly, letting the narrative unfold at a deliberate, artful pace.
-
88Moneyball is a hilarious and provocative change-up, entertaining without feeling the need to swing for the fences.
-
88Although you don't have to be a sports fan to enjoy it, Moneyball is one of the best baseball movies imaginable.
-
88It's tense, strangely funny in a lot of spots and – if you grew up loving old-fashioned, seat-of-the-pants baseball, as I did – the most depressing movie of the year.
-
88Moneyball is one of the best and most viscerally exciting films of the year.
-
88This is a subtle, elegant and altogether triumphant film about a subject I thought I was tired of, told with an artistry and freshness that is positively thrilling.
-
88Moneyball is a thinking person's baseball movie, and a baseball fan's thinking movie.
-
83It's a sports story, yes, because without baseball there's no Beane. But it's far more a tale of a man's triumph over himself and his doubters. And you don't need math to make sense of that.
-
83Miller directs with intelligence, though not flair, but the script makes up for any flagging energy with crackling Sorkin dialogue and performances that sing with revolutionary fervor.
-
83Director Bennett Miller has produced a warm and generally agreeable character study about the pratfalls of athletic institutions and the willingness to think outside the box.
-
80You don't need to understand anything of baseball to get behind this, a chest-swelling story about second chances and flipping a finger up (even a giant foam one) to The Man.
-
80Statistics and their alleged true meaning are at the heart of Moneyball, but it's also one of the most soulful of baseball movies - it confronts the anguish of a tough game.
-
80It's to the director's credit, and Pitt's, that Moneyball is anything but bloodless - in its own quiet, unspectacular way, this movie courses with life.
-
80A richly detailed and enjoyable American yarn.
-
80This extraordinary hybrid of a movie lives and breathes the game, yet its achievement is bigger than that. There's a touch of old-fashioned romanticism here, but more crucially there's strategy going on inside Bennett Miller's movie that turns it into something cool and special.
-
80On some level Moneyball is about loyalty: loyalty to an idea, loyalty to a partnership forged by desperation, loyalty to the values you believe in. Whether that was Lewis' intention in the book, or Beane's intention in taking the risk, doesn't matter. It's the formula Miller came up with for the film, and with the team of Pitt and Hill, it's a winning one.
-
80Best of all, filmmaker Bennett Miller (Capote) uses this brainiac sports movie to remind viewers that money is neither the measure of a man nor the ultimate assessment of quality; it's a myopic metric based on past accomplishments rather than future potential. After all, success isn't always about the home runs so much as just getting on base - again, and again, and again.
-
78Moneyball is a smart, funny, and thoughtful baseball movie.
-
75Moneyball presents a misleading story line in order to prop up Billy Beane as some kind of would-be miracle worker antihero. In truth, he's just another tobacco-chewing go-getter trying to make sense of a game that, thankfully, has never quite made sense.
-
75Turning the stately game into something few can resist – a smart and lively comedy of manners.
-
75Pitt and Hill are fantastic individually, and hilarious when together -- and on a surprisingly engaging script by Aaron Sorkin ("Social Network") and Steve Zaillian ("Schindler's List").
-
75Moneyball comes to life when elaborating on Beane's unique system of player selection, and the on-field baseball action is at times electrifying, but it trends toward the generic when tailing him away from the stadium.
-
70The movie doesn't quite come together, but it's full of smart, cynical talk, and it's very entertaining.
-
70The movie does achieve something nearly impossible: Someone who doesn't even like the sport may care about Billy Beane and the 2002 Oakland Athletics.
-
50Naysayers have been claiming for years that the "Moneyball" book wouldn't work as a movie. But ultimately, it's the cinematic touches that keep this film version from becoming something exceptional.
-
50True to Hollywood's tireless efforts to fit square-peg material into roundish genre niches, this wavering, intermittently smart story of daring to think differently flattens its narrative into formula.