- Studio: Cowboy Booking International
- Release Date: Feb 18, 2000
- Critic Score
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91A sprightly, lovingly researched, rather misty-eyed sports documentary that's steeped in ethnic pride.
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91A rousing and agreeable movie that resurrects a small but important episode in baseball history that parallels the larger history of the nation.
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90Engaging and revelatory, turning forgotten footnotes and discarded minutiae into the stuff of riveting drama and poignant laughs.
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89Kempner's documentary is a streamlined, gorgeous piece of work, full of revelations of time, place, and person.
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Tells an inspiring story, unknown or forgotten by many, while bringing the past to life and illuminating issues that persist today.
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88Kempner demonstrates how the star's success and dignified bearing inspired a generation of Jews to fight through the ethnic barriers in all fields.
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88Scrupulously made and deeply affectionate.
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88A model of what a largely talking-heads documentary should be, with on-camera testimonials and lots of film clips that offer layers of context.
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88While it preserves his baseball feats, it looks beyond them to clarify Greenberg's place in American culture.
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88Filled with delightful sequences.
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88Hank Greenberg was to Jews what Jackie Robinson was to African Americans: a great athlete, handsome and hard-working, who took the first line of abuse from bigots and proved that his people belonged at the highest level of professional sports.
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80What director Aviva Kempner has done is shine a light into the past and recover a classic American hero, one with all the integrity, decency and largeness of spirit that we have been taught makes up the American character.
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80Aviva Kempner's warm and intelligent mash note to a man who clearly deserved it.
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80A portrait of a hero.
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75If there's a flaw, it's that Kempner has fashioned more a hagiography than true biography.
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75Hits one out of the park.
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70Places Greenberg in historical context -- as a pioneering Jew and as an all-American sports hero.
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70Sharing its subject's virtues, it is a lovely addition to the annals of the Greatest Generation.
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70Kempner's lighthearted yet not apolitical collage conveys how Greenberg's success as an athlete in the 30s and 40s contradicted an ethnic stereotype.
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Offers insights from a host of former players.
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60A fine, straightforward tribute to a sports giant who faced blatant prejudice and paved away for the likes Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron and other minorities who dared make a place for themselves as heroes of America's greatest pastime.
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60Simultaneously fascinating and vexing in ways that might tax informed devotees of both baseball and film.
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57Aviva Kempner's utterly conventional documentary plays like a lost chapter from Ken Burns' "Baseball."
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50In the absence of any greater cultural context, the ritual reiteration of Greenberg's greatness grows wearisome.
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