Metacritic Film

Fever Pitch

Starring Luke Aikman, Bea Guard, Neil Pearson, Ruth Gemmel, and Colin Firth

MPAA RATING: Not rated

Phaedra Cinema
Romance
102 minutes | Color
UK
Released In Theaters September 24, 1999

Paul, and English teacher who is obsessed with English football -- specifically the perennial championship-less Arsenal-- enters into a roller-coaster romance with Sarah who, in the end, is forced to appreciate the virtues of the sport.

WRITTEN BY
Nick Hornby

DIRECTED BY
David Evans

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

55 / 100

Critic Reviews

88 New York Post
Vastly superior to the small and independent films that have come out during the last six months.
88 New York Daily News
A sweetly hilarious romantic comedy about a soccer fan whose favorite pro team's unexpected success threatens to push him over the edge.
70 Washington Post
If you don't operate on the premise that soccer is the most important thing in the universe, you might not go along with everything in Fever Pitch.
50 TV Guide
It's an amiable enough picture, and genuinely insightful about the emotional appeal of devoted fandom.
50 Christian Science Monitor
The story is unmemorable, but the characters are engaging and their predicaments are all too recognizable.
50 The New York Times Anita Gates
Just because a first-person analysis of a sociocultural phenomenon is fascinating in print, it should not necessarily be turned into a movie.
40 Chicago Reader
This frantic tale seems at once preachy and incoherent, collapsing into a more or less random collection of disconnected, unfocused scenes.
30 Village Voice
The entire matter of totemistic home-team dementia is roasted on a spit and then embraced for all its sorry pointlessness.

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