| 88 |
Boston Globe
After revitalizing baseball movies with "Field of Dreams" and "Bull Durham," he's now three for three with the funny, quirky, rueful, and richly textured For Love of the Game.
|
| 83 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Goes down like a cool glass of lemonade on a hot day.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
It is impossible to think of anyone but Costner in this role. His commitment and sincerity are never in doubt.
|
| 75 |
Portland Oregonian
More of a bunt than a home run.
|
| 70 |
Los Angeles Times
Those who have even a small soft spot for baseball's soothing rhythms will be hard-pressed to resist it.
|
| 68 |
Mr. Showbiz
Eleonore Snow
None of their efforts can turn this ho-hum, mildly entertaining line-drive single into a solid, explosive home run.
|
| 65 |
TNT RoughCut
Jennifer Nowitzky
A bona fide, no-doubt-about-it love story disguised as a sports movie.
|
| 63 |
New York Daily News
It could do without any kind of love story, let alone the one it got.
|
| 60 |
Dallas Observer
The game is cool to watch, and the love story is assertive enough to hook even the stodgiest ESPN man.
|
| 50 |
TV Guide
The weighty themes of loss, regret and abdication of personal responsibility are undermined by the reverential use of baseball as a symbol of mankind's potential for selfless greatness.
|
| 50 |
Miami Herald
The real love affair in For Love of the Game is between Costner and himself.
|
| 50 |
Christian Science Monitor
This sentimental drama is wildly uneven as it switches between ballpark scenes, which are very involving, and romantic episodes, which are badly overplayed.
|
| 50 |
LA Weekly
The film's larger, surprisingly mature emotional rhythms are strong enough to pull it through.
|
| 50 |
Entertainment Weekly
Costner's determination to avoid change keeps this baseball movie at a low line drive when it might have knocked one into the bleachers.
|
| 50 |
Variety
Costner is as uneven as the storytelling itself, stone cold at moments, shimmeringly real in others.
|
| 50 |
USA Today
Tested my own love of the game more than anything since the time Roseanne screeched the national anthem.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Tribune
Much of this movie seems a crock.
|
| 50 |
San Francisco Examiner
Edvins Beitiks
A piece of baseball fluff...Costner cinema, pure and simple.
|
| 40 |
Austin Chronicle
Watching Raimi's visual style and narrative verve flatten out into this pale reiteration of a middle-aged-male weepie is an exercise in modern horror.
|
| 40 |
Film.com
Costner's serious-as-a-heart-attack performance...slowly kills the movie's energy in a gooey morass of forced sincerity.
|
| 40 |
Rolling Stone
Plays like an unholy union of "The Natural" and "The Prince of Tides." Too bad...Build a movie as a shrine to baseball and they will come. Suckers!
|
| 40 |
Film.com
Moira Macdonald
Call it baseball interruptus, or just call it a missed opportunity.
|
| 40 |
The New York Times
Sometimes even a talented lineup produces unexceptional results.
|
| 38 |
Chicago Sun-Times
It's the most lugubrious and soppy love story in many a moon, a step backward for director Sam Raimi after "A Simple Plan."
|
| 38 |
New York Post
Rod Dreher
It's "The Postman" on a pitcher's mound.
|
| 30 |
Time
You will simply want to shoot yourself by the third inning.
|
| 30 |
Village Voice
Costner himself is the doggedly humorless heart and soul (and brains?) of this monumentally maudlin picture.
|
| 30 |
Salon.com
A dreary, humorless affair, with no real feeling for the rhythms of either baseball or love.
|
| 30 |
Washington Post
The baseball half of the story just slightly works. ... Nothing in [the other] half of the film works.
|
| 30 |
Chicago Reader
For the first 100 minutes or so I found this hokey but serviceable; after that my watch became more meaningful than anything I could locate on-screen.
|
| 25 |
Baltimore Sun
This dialogue isn't helped by two actors who look terrific but can barely choke out a word that sounds remotely authentic or spontaneous.
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